Enchantrella did try some mining, using the long-term ore mines for a change, rather than the quickly-used-up ore veins; she lasted rather longer, too, but did crash in the end. I can see that I may well have to start using tool aids, something I've always avoided doing. Later in the day, Zeratus reported that he had also had a mining session ended by "Send error message?", so let us hope that this is a known issue, or bug, that will soon be worked out.

MistressDomino did some selling overnight, and sold out of the Tool Aids she was carrying (though there are plenty more in storage, after Damor sold me over a hundred yesterday at a suitably bargain price - we couldn't do the exchange in one attempt, you can't trade if it means your weight will go above 100%), and also sold all the pink and blue candy I'd got so far. I'd decided to sell them at 50,000 each, which seemed to be the lowest price one actually saw around - though there are plenty of people trying for 200,000 or more! When she came out of merchant mode, it was a little bit strange, as she couldn't browse other people's shops, the window just wouldn't open when she clicked on them. Another minor bug...

So, SirDarth and Enchantrella went out to the Treants, in their usual "combat party" way. The experience varies from one Treant to the next, but they get exactly the same skill exp, for example 497 each (though the figure was sometimes as high as 600), while on the same Treant Darth gets 3370 experience and Enchantrella, for doing nothing but standing there waiting in case a pink candy drops, gets 527 experience points. Drops seem to be shared equally; it may be because Darth is doing the fighting that more blue candy than pink seems to drop, but it rather defeats the avowed aims of this week if the candy gets randomly distributed between them when it is picked up, surely Darth should get the blue candy, and Enchie should get the pink? It doesn't matter to me, the items that MistressDomino will be selling get exchanged across to Darth at the end of the session anyway.

Zeratus has started a new rogue on a second account, mainly to use as a merchant, and got Captianjack to help him move some items across to her, so that she can afford armour etc. I commented that rogues as merchants are a bit small to see, sitting hunched up on the ground - which is one reason that there are a lot of mage merchants, since their equivalent of sitting is hovering in mid-air. A rogue on horseback is fine, but I don't think any character sitting on a dragon is much good, the "shop sign" is so far above their heads that it's hard to see who it belongs to. Zeratus got his rogue to level 10, and I think he said he'd a mage that was almost there too.

There was an unfortunate incident when I was on my food break. I'd left SirDarth and Enchantrella by the entrance to Velpist Temple, and when I happened to look at the screen, they were being attacked by three Elder Drakes! Sadly, Enchantrella was killed, as these are aggressive beasts, but Darth then managed to kill them. It was strange, usually that area is completely clear, and the Elder Drakes are well away - I rather suspect that an annoying rogue called Waiyung might have had something to do with it, she has ks'd, taken a pink candy one of my Treants dropped before Enchantrella could get to it, asked for a party, called me a "lier" when, after saying that I would soon be logging out, I was still fighting after a couple of minutes, drawn some Treants across where I was resting and then accused me of ks-ing when I fought one of them, and asked for a party again. She is the Last Chaos player I'd least like to party with!

While she was back in town Enchantrella used her store of skill points to start learning how to craft armour, rather than continue with material processing at the moment. Then Darth and Enchie, after that slight setback, continued to slog away at the Treants. Enchantrella is now halfway through level 23, and has spent 238 skill points to learn Basic Armoursmith and Advanced Armoursmith (3 levels each); Expert Armoursmith will take rather more to learn, but at least she has 9 skill points towards the 120 needed for its first level...153 and 179 points will be needed after that for the other two levels.

SirDarth is now 72% into level 28, and his drake has reached level 26, and is at 2424/5639 towards his next level. And the unused skill point tally has risen to 649, so we aren't doing badly.

Trick or Treant - June 17th

Enchantrella actually avoided crashing at the mine today, though she didn't actually stay very long. At least I think I've finally worked out how to make sure that mining does actually start when it ought to, now, though this has nothing to do with the crashing - if you find that the "Endurance" of your hammer is not going down, just, without stopping mining, sit down and stand up again, and with any luck you'll be in business.

After various exchanging around of accessories and cash and pan flutes, which took about an hour, including trips to that wacky archaeologist in Dratan City, it was time to get SirDarth and the loyal Enchantrella back into action out by Velpist Temple against the Treants again. So that's how I spent the rest of the afternoon, and almost all of the evening too.

Captianjack got in touch to say that a real life friend of his, a level 20 mage called Sabalonn, wanted to join Norcaine, which was good news - but after Kaerella had made the trip to Cariae-4's Randol to chat and recruit, we eventually came up against the "wait one week after leaving a previous guild" rule. Still, with any luck Cap will arrange for her to contact us next Tuesday. As a guild it is difficult to promise much help in the grind to level up, but when the time comes we will, hopefully, see what we can do. Another active mage in Norcaine would be good.

Soon after eight o'clock, Darth levelled up to level 29 - and while the Treants' names are green now, they seem to be giving just as much experience as before - or maybe a little more, in this "combat party" arrangement. Before, the maximum skill exp for a kill was 600, now 626 or even 632 is possible. The experience figure varies a lot, but 3543 has been seen, which seems well up to standard. Given that Darth is carrying almost 700 unused skill points, staying away from Merac, and its possibility of a sudden arrival by the Great Red Dragon, seems sensible, until level 30 is reached. And this way Enchantrella continues to get experience, and, more importantly, skill exp. Of course, each level requires more experience than the one before, so that each Treant is only worth .04 or .05% now, so progress is slowing down.

Enchantrella is now almost three-quarters of the way through her level, with 55 unused skill points; SirDarth is 12% of the way into level 29, with 695 spare skill points - though of course 500 of them will be used to get Norcaine up to the sixth rank of guilds. Some more pink and blue candies have dropped, but the price of these items is coming right down, as one might expect. Last night's selling price of 35,000 gold now seems rather high...

Disconnections & Deaths - June 18th

SirDarth picked up a few minor quests, such as visiting the archaeologist-type out in Dratan desert - it was good to see that his encampment hadn't changed much since the old version of the map - and collecting some items that Butchers dropped in Merac, and turning them in for a reward. These quests provided a small but useful experience boost; it was interesting to see that the level 28 Butchers didn't give as much experience, in a solo party, as the level 26 Treants do in a combat party. Darth was careful to keep an easy escape route open while fighting the Butchers in case the GRD turned up, but all was quiet. The solo party was with Enchantrella, who waited patiently in Randol while Darth rode around the desert, and fought his way through the Butchers northwest of Merac Caron...and then Darth and Enchantrella went out to the Treants, in an area that seems to attract annoying young rogues.

After an hour or so, though, Damor got in touch, with an invitation for Kee to join her, Itura and Escadalia in Egeha for some Boucu Demon fighting, so I changed character appropriately, headed for Cariae-5, and joined the party. And it all went pretty well, to begin with. Damor even did some of the real "power levelling", where she vanishes back to the village when the demon is down to about 5 to 10% health, so that Esca and I share all the experience, rather than just taking a small (to Damor) proportion of the experience by "ks-ing" her kill. The deal was that we passed all the loot we picked up over to her, which was certainly fair enough. It added up to very nearly a quarter of a million from me, for the first session, so no wonder Damor likes to go there to raise cash; the only good drop had been allocated to Itura anyway.

We continued, back to ks-ing, for a while, and then Damor decided that we'd do a whole hour of power-levelling, and advised us both to use the special triple-strength experience Iris boosters, one of which I'd been holding on to for just such an occasion. For the first half hour things were fine, but then my connection went flakey. And when one lags out, well, that means that as far as everyone else (demons included) is concerned, one just stands there, within range of where the demon will respawn. So, death. There was another death soon after that was a little more normal, we just couldn't kill the demon after Damor left...maybe it had slightly more health left than sometimes, and maybe our attacks just happened to miss more often than usual, but in the end Itura couldn't keep up with the healing, and Damor's "Sloth" spell ran out... and while I usually keep that skill handy, as I was only just back I hadn't set it up yet. My connection got worse then, with me disconnecting within minutes of managing to re-log in...and then I just couldn't log in, I kept getting the "timed out" message - which, since a Platinum Blessed Iris counts down its expensive hour "regardless of connection time", was more than a little frustrating. The rest of the internet was fine, but connecting to the Last Chaos server just didn't happen.

Modem restarts, game restarts...nothing seemed to work. My older upstairs machine managed to connect, so that Darth was able to send a message - and then I logged Kee in on it, and joined the party once more. That was a bit of a mistake, as the older machine has its limitations, and the low-power graphics card means that brightness options are greyed out, so that some places get awfully dark. When Egeha finally loaded, I went forward, got on my mount to get horse buffs - and suddenly got attacked by a demon, which must have spawned a bit nearer to the middle than usual. So a third death...and my horse died too. Getting a level 38 mount "unsealed" costs 373,996 gold, which is a little expensive. By then the Iris hour was just about up, so that was the end of the adventure, and I went off for some much-delayed food.

When I spoke to them later both Escadalia and Damor were very sympathetic. Damor let me keep the level 72 rogue boots that I'd picked up as loot, and a pink candy or two, which was kind. Escadalia was telling me that after my departure, Damor took her off to the mysterious Pyramid; Escadlia only needed another 14% to level up for a second time...but some deaths in that unfamiliar territory (well, unfamiliar to me, anyway) mean that she now needs 20%. So maybe it was just as well I wasn't available for that little trip...as it was, I did end up 5 skill points down, but 72% up on the levelling, which is pretty good for an Egeha trip really, and a little way into level 48, with 580 more pet points too. Of course if the connection had behaved I might be within hailing distance of level 49, when Kee can start to use her next +10 staff, but another Egeha adventure or two should get me there. Level 49 is what I am aiming for...but I do have the gloves I'll be able to wear at level 50, too!

Well, I returned to Darth and Enchantrella, and after all the upheaval my connection behaved perfectly. There was one strange moment when someone ran towards where we were fighting a few Treants, bringing three Elder Drakes with him, but they didn't show any interest in us, and wouldn't have done Darth any great amount of harm anyway, though Enchantrella might have had to run for it. Enchantrella now has 75 skill points towards her armour-making skills, and is 82% of the way through level 23, while Darth is 35% of the way through level 29 now, with 719 unused skill points. So he is on target and on schedule.

Back To Normal - June 19th

Enchantrella did a little mining without crashing at lunchtime, which had led me to hope that the crashing problem associated with that might have been overcome. The mine area is still suspiciously quiet, though, and I'd say that the price people are charging for quality stones was higher. When I was getting a new pony recently from the loony, er, I mean, NPC, in Dratan City, I actually read through his strange ramblings, and it seems to explain why one's pony, or horse, eats stones rather than, say, oats. It isn't a real pony, it's a statue of one...

The new Last Chaos front page on the Aeria games website has some interesting pictures, with a mage, a healer, and a third female character shown at the top - in fact, it is a female sorcerer, and at the bottom the sorcerer statistics have a female face by them, with elvish pointy ears. Today's newsletter also shows some forthcoming top-level armours, and the sorc set also looks remarkably feminine. So the sorcerers among us may well get a bit of a shock some week after the newest patch...

Well SirDarth and Enchantrella went out in the afternoon to Treant Central, as usual; I'll be glad when the blue and pink candy drop fortnight is over, I just don't like leaving stuff on the ground so I have to send out a team of male and female characters when normally I'd solo it, or one type of candy would just lie there. Though the chance to get Enchantrella some experience and skill exp, at only a small sacrifice in Darth's skill exp gain, is rather useful as a one-off. In all, Darth added 12% before the tea break (and moved his skill point total on to 734), when he and Enchantrella both headed for the mine. As Enchantrella was on the upstairs computer, I set her to one of the low-level Ore Mines, with Darth on an Ore Vein - when I checked back downstairs after a few minutes, though, I could see that Enchie had stopped mining - when I went upstairs, the old "Send Error Message?" window was on display. Darth himself lasted until just about the end of the break, before he too crashed out. So the problem does still exist.

Damor had told me, mid afternoon, that a level 49 mage staff, +12, was on sale at 35 million; as Kee is less than a level away from out-growing it, it hardly seemed worth purchasing, though Damor commented that she thought it could be sold for 40. And then, during the food break, she sent word that there might be an impending trip to Egeha...

Actually, it wasn't impending, as things turned out she arranged to help someone other than Escadalia level for a while, someone who didn't find having a spare mage around useful, so I had time to do some shopping. SirDarth transferred the two level 33 Eagle Swords that I'd been saving over from my junior, storage knight, and also the Glorious Gauntlets he'll be able to wear at level 30, if he can plus them a bit. The spare sword was swiftly converted into two smelting stones, both of which worked, which was very lucky as they generally have a one in three chance of successfully upgrading an item. I bought a level 33 sorcerer's fallarm from somebody in merchant mode for 20,000 gold, and made that into smelting stones, and the second of those worked as well, giving me a +3 weapon. I took a "threefer" (three lucky smelting stones for the price of two, a special offer from a few weeks ago) out of Mall storage, and used them to get the sword up to +6, so now Darth has, instead of a Light of Odin +6 sword doing 83 + 34 damage, an Eagle Sword +6 doing 92 + 38.

So, with Damor busy elsewhere, it was back out to the Treants, hopefully the last day but one for this particular slog, unless I get called away to Egeha tomorrow. After a while a GM message came up saying "You have 20 minutes to kill everything! Better work fast." Actually some GM had hit the wrong button, or forgotten that his words would go out server-wide, because it just referred to a "Storm The Castle" event being held in Merac. Zeratus was there - but the monsters weren't, some GM (probably Moose) forgot to hit some other button, at least for a few minutes, until it did finally get under way. But it led me to thinking that a message like that could make for a fun event on its own - with everyone who was on Juno rushing around trying to kill every single monster on the map before a deadline was reached, with monster respawning switched off of course. Hard luck on any pet levellers afk-ing away, and one would have to check the places they hide, but generally it would make a busy time for everyone.

By the end of the evening, Enchantrella had just levelled up to level 24, and Darth had reached the 73% mark, with 763 unused skill points - his drake has nearly caught him up too, at level 28. With 500 skill points needed to upgrade the Norcaine guild, and 228 points needed for the level 30 skill Mana Break, Darth has made his target safely - except for the little detail of actually reaching level 30, that is!

Life at Thirty - June 20th

Darth did a couple of crashes' worth of mining, just to get a few stones, while MistressDomino continued a lengthy overnight selling session right up to lunchtime, taking in a satisfactory bit of cash, which is always useful. After lunch, it was time for the fearless SirDarth, and the intrepid Enchantrella, to head back to the terrible trees, the Treants.

And so the time passed, with only the occasional drop of a piece of candy to keep things interesting. At four o'clock the forum thread for the Saturday "Upgrade Love" event was due to open, so I made sure I was logged in there, and when the hour was reached, I was ready to pounce. Unfortunately, the system wasn't ready - on the "shoutbox" a forum mod said the whole thing was on a timer, so he couldn't interfere or he might break the whole arrangement - so why was the timer set to start things late, I wonder? Still, at around ten past the threads for the various servers were unlocked, and it was possible to compose one's post. Of course the forums have a wonderful system where they won't accept a new post if another post has been made while it was being composed, which is normally a good idea, as it stops you being "snaked" by a new answer to a topic, but with these sign-ups it is incredibly annoying - but on the fourth of fifth attempt I actually got to register, the eighth person on the Cariae server to do so, four ahead of fellow guildie Psykore. By the end of the half hour, actually, less than 50 people had posted to the Cariae thread, so I needn't have hurried! Last time they did this I missed the afternoon (well, 8:00am Pacific Time) sign-up because my internet went down, and had to stay awake for the second chance at one in the morning, uk time, so things had got better.

After that it was time for a slightly early food break, so that I'd be back in time to take full advantage of the EU "Happy Hour", scheduled to start at five and last two hours, with double experience. Darth and Enchantrella had stayed on-site, so were back in action in time...though it wasn't until 5:26 by my computer-clock that the event was actually switched on! Still, it lasted until 8:47, which can't be bad.

Anyway, Darth got to level 30 at last, not long into the event, so Kaerella promoted him to Guild Master, he took 2,000,000 gold out of storage, and he went to the guard captain, and upgraded Norcaine to level six. The big change this makes is to the "manage guild" window, reached from the "G" pop-up window and its "guild" tab...it's a lot bigger now, with various options, and shows guild member levels and which map the online people are playing...though this seems not to be reliable, it told me that a couple of people who were actually in Merac were in Juno. The bit with the available skills is on one of a number of tabs - but it lists our guild points as zero, ignoring all those red carnations we collected, sigh.

After reinstating Kae as Guild Master, Darth went and got his five levels of the Mana Break skill, which cost slightly more skill points than expected, as to get it required at least the first level of three other skills he'd not previously acquired - and then he and Enchantrella headed out into Merac to fight the Butchers northwest of town. This worked pretty well, with some Pilferers also falling before Darth's blade, but after a while I decided to head back, as an experiment, to the Treants, and found that they still give a fair amount of experience and skill exp in "combat mode" with Enchie, almost as much as the Butchers - and of course you can fight them almost as quickly as you can kill them, you don't have to run around all the time from one to the next, so it looks as if, for experience per hour, they are still hard to beat. And there was me thinking I'd seen the last of them with Darth...

Some more investigation of the new guild stuff is needed - I think Kae needs to go to our guild hall and talk to the NPC there. Damor (who has now reached level 80, she just told me!) should be able to help me sort things out; if necessary Itura, as she is in Norcaine, can take over as guild master for a little while to arrange things. But as for Darth, the pressure is off now. It would be nice to make him into a templar knight, but there is plenty of time for that. He got 25% of the way into level 30, anyway, and now is carrying a more reasonable 74 unused skill points instead of ten times that many. And Enchantrella got the first level of Expert Armoursmith too.

Upgrading - June 21st

Enchantrella tried some mining today, but at both lunchtime and teatime she crashed out during the second sequence - so at least a few stones were acquired. The quietness of the usual mining area north of Randol shows that this is still a big problem. I did actually buy some quality stones in town, just to keep my stocks up - quality stones in particular will be needed if Enchantrella needs to use her weapon and armour crafting skills.

Well, I fiddled around with a few minor characters, and Keerella browsed the various Cariae sub-servers on the lookout for useful stuff, but the best thing she found was just a level 33 +4 shield for SirDarth. However, Damor came on after a while, and I was asking her about the way to set up the guild, now that Norcaine has reached level six and has access to the big, wide guild control window.

Very kindly, Damor temporarily left Dominion, the guild she leads, and let herself be recruited into Norcaine. It was then a matter of Kaerella (as Norcaine Guild Master) highlighting her on the list of members, using the "set" button to bring up a new little window, entering a name or title, and putting 99% in the two "contribution" boxes. Then Damor set to work in Egeha, gaining almost no experience for herself (apparently a 100% donation isn't possible at present) but earning masses of guild points for us. In all, in an hour or so, she racked up enough experience, fighting the Boucu Demons (yellow-named to her now that she's level 80) and other locals, to bring us what was listed as 13,497 guild points, but was probably more. To show his support, SirDarth went out to the Treants again, starting a little later - and scored 22! While Damor and Darth were getting almost no experience, they were getting the usual quantity of skill experience, which makes the 99% donation setting rather useful sometimes if people need skill points but don't want to level up and "leave behind" the particular monsters they were farming. Damor says some of her guild people stick at level 12 to fight the Sasquatches, though of course between level 10 and level 20 people tend to be on a ten-day timer to successfully finish their apprenticeship and get that very useful "event weapon". Level 26 to fight Treants would probably be another good point, or level 20 to fight Drakes...or level 6 is apparently sometimes used, for the Berserk Wolves.

So, Kae was able to spend another 1,000,000 gold, on top of yesterday's 2,000,000 (plus 500 skill points, to upgrade the guild to level six), and 6000 guild points, to earn the guild skill "Guild Notice" level zero, and then spend a further 200,000, and 2000 guild points, to learn "Expension of the guild member" (sic) level one, allowing Norcaine to have five more member slots beyond the five gained by the guild going up the one level. Thanks to Damor, Norcaine is thus in good shape, if we can only get some good active new members. A shame Damor had to leave, really, having a level 80 member did wonders for our average level. She was saying that there was a way to leave a guild without having to be guildless for a week, other than getting kicked out - but as it involved using the character "delete" button on the character choice screen, there might be some slight risk involved. Actually, deleting is a difficult thing to do, there is a 24 hour "cooling off period", to allow people to change their minds, or at least to remember to empty the character's inventory.

Talk of the forthcoming change to the game in which Evasion will be either scrapped entirely or very much toned down made me think of my expensive Pierce of Wind accessories, and how it looked as if my rogue would miss out on being able to use them properly - so I transferred them over from Kee, and Karella, recruited now into Norcaine since we have the room, teamed up with SirDarth for some Treant-fighting, after Kae had adjusted Darth's donation level down to 25%. But at level 23, even with the dexterity and evasion boost, Karella needed horse buffs and probably Divine Shield, and is really a bit underpowered as yet for Treants, so she ended up taking Enchantrella's usual non-combatant role for most of the time, letting Darth do the work. After a while she left, and Enchantrella took over, as she is more in need of the skill exp boost.

The evening's "Upgrade Love" event started at 8:00pm UK time, but the Cariae server was third on the list to be done, which left me wondering how late I'd have to stay online; the event was scheduled to end, after the fourth server group, at approaching 1:00am UK time. But things must have moved along rather swiftly, as it was only a few minutes after nine when I found myself up on the edge of the world - a very similar spot to where Leo goes to pet-train, though closer to Velpist Temple than the GHB lake. A GM was there, and this time I had the sense to immediately remove Darth's pet drake, to make trading Kee's next staff to him easy. The GM and the GS SouxieR didn't actually trade the improved +11 staff back, I just noticed it alongside me, and picked it up. And it was a very short downhill run back to where Darth had been fighting the Treants, along with Enchantrella again. By 9:45 the GMs had moved on to the final server group, Katar. I don't think the event was "fully subscribed", not a huge number of people enrolled for it. Psykore did the first part, the forum sign-up, but wasn't online this evening, so he is out of luck unless they do a "second sweep" through the servers for late arrivals.

So, that just left me to do a bit more Treant-fighting. Enchantrella now has 64 skill points towards the 153 needed for the second level of Expert Armoursmith, and is 32% of the way into level 24. Darth has just added 10% experience, but moved on to 106 skill points - maybe he should put them towards the 129 needed for the final level of Upgrade Mana (increases his total mana) or Divine Soul (increases magical defence by 10), or maybe he needs to start saving up for the level 32 skills...all in all, it is more skill points he needs, to make up for the 500 given away to the guild, if he is to be a "fully loaded" fighting knight one day.

Quiz Time - June 22nd

Enchantrella bravely went mining at lunch and teatime today - she lasted into the third mining period at lunch, and into the second at tea, before the inevitable crashes, so got a few stones for her trouble. Earlier, MistressDomino had been trying to sell a few items, despite a couple of disconnections. A few lucky scrolls and oddments did sell, but not a huge amount.

Once I actually started playing, Karella, my rogue, had half an hour at the Drakes, and then I gave Elva's account a little outing by taking Jacqueline down to the Bandits and Berserkers. She didn't stay there very long, but at least she got a Heaven Stone! Damor got in touch to say that she had managed to obtain the level 57 +11 mage staff from her friend for 40 million, rather than the initial asking price of 43 million, and Kee made a trip to Egeha on Cariae-5 to collect it from her, and pay the cash for it. As she was on the upstairs computer, she didn't stay there long, though made the mistake of mentioning to a knight what Damor's level was - apparently that's not a good idea on a PvP server, though, as Damor appears on the list of the top fifty Cariae mages, it's hardly a secret in her case. At that stage Damor hadn't got a third player to take the Escadalia role for a bit of power levelling, so it was soon time to sign off for food.

After my food break, I switched to SirDarth and Enchantrella, and headed out to the Treants; Sunday's teatime event had just begun, and, although there had, unusually, been no advance publicity on the Last Chaos website, it was double experience again. I had only just begun when Damor got in touch. She had still got our favourite Boucu Demon spot, and an Archer from her guild, Maddiz, was there - about ten levels ahead of me, and able to deal a lot of damage to the demons, as well as supply a little healing for us sometimes, while Itura as usual concentrated on Damor. So it was a matter of making a swift change to Kee, moving server to Cariae-5, registering, and taking Damor's recall to Egeha. To begin with, there was another Dominion high-level archer there, Chealsea, and I'm not sure what system was being used - Damor wasn't doing the last-minute mounted "return to village" thing, but Maddiz and I were getting a good amount of experience. But Chealsea soon had to leave, and we switched to the "return to village" method. Damor had asked me to bring 200 of the scrolls of memorizing with me, and I passed them over to her - and got an armour drop in return, probably worth more than the 200,000 gold I paid for the scrolls!

The session was a little under an hour, as Damor wanted to leave in good time for the weekly Quiz, so that she could get all four of her computers running, and four characters into the Cariae-4 quiz room; I wasn't sure why it had to be that particular non-PvP sub-server, it's not as if fights break out in there, but apparently Damor reckons that its quiz room tends to be less crowded than the others. Kee went along too, or course, and SirDarth was my second character in attendance; we both clicked on Damor, and settled back to watch the show, crossing my fingers that I wouldn't get a crash this week. Sadly, one of the trickier questions, concerning how much it costs to get a level 17 horse pet revived/unsealed, defeated the finest minds, and there was a sudden mass respawning in Randol marketplace. We had managed to get 12 questions right, thanks to Damor's knowledge of all the teleporters and their names, so didn't leave empty- handed - 10 tool aids each is always useful. It's a pity we didn't have any moonstones or heaven stones as booty as well, but you can't win them all.

Unfortunately, my connection decided that it had been playing ball too long, and started to play up - lucky I wasn't in Egeha, but of course during the quiz someone else had taken over our prime Boucu Demon spot. Darth and Enchantrella attempted to get out to the Treants, but managed to kill very few before a brace of disconnections. It was time to try restarting the modem, but as sometimes happens that "broke" the network abilities, so the upstairs computer, my gateway to the wide world of the internet, needed to have a System Restore. Still, as usual that got things back in working order, and Kee was able to go out to the Elite Goblins (and Rough Jaguars of Desert) for a little skill point farming. Well, given that my top speed with them is rather less than 10 points an hour, it's not very productive at the moment, by the end of horse buffs I'm down to a third health and about half mana, so I need time to recover before the next buff-time. Handy for drafting the blog, though! Things ought to be better when I reach level 49, however, my current +10 staff, the level 45 Mehtahtolon Staff, gives 178 + 140 attack, while my level 53 +11 Darkwhite Staff will give 234 + 258 attack, an improvement of 54.7% in my attack, by my calculations, though Damor reminds me that the actual weapon's attack figure is not the whole story, one's accessories, armour etc also make their contributions. I never did find a level 49 one, so will be skipping that staff entirely, hence the big jump.

Anyway, after a session there Kee had moved on by a further 2% experience, on top of the 71% from Damor's session in Egeha - and not only got back the 5 skill points lost on the previous Egeha outing (3 deaths), but got 2 all-new point too! You guessed it, my farming there is awfully slow... And just as I was ready to log out, Sammotina got in touch, using her other (Zedan) account, asking me to keep the Sammotina one active for her too. But when I logged in to that account, it was empty, no characters at all, so it looks as if she left it just too long between visits. I'm still going to keep the Zedan account active, anyway, and have promised to even try using its sorcerer, though that is a player type I know incredibly little about.

Slow Progress - June 23rd

I seem to start every posting with mentions of Darth and Enchantrella going mining until they crash, on average about 10 to 15 minutes in - so let's just take that bit as read, shall we? I also find I sometimes crash when logging in: User Name, Password, Enter, Send Error Report...?

I posted on the official Last Chaos forums yesterday about Norcaine's arrival at level six and places available for new members:

Norcaine Guild is Recruiting

Norcaine has just reached level six, so we have some new slots for friendly, active members. We are mainly to be found on c3 and c6 - some of our original members seem to have drifted away from LC, sadly, so we need new blood!

Generally we'll welcome players from level 25 upwards, though if you are starting a new character you intend to advance pretty quickly, we will gladly help you along - some people like to "freeze" their experience gain while they concentrate on getting lots of skill points from berserk wolves, sasquatches, drakes or treants, for example, and as a level six guild we can do that for you. We can also take on apprentices in the Guardian program, as long as you're able to get from level 10 to level 20 within the time allowed.

Our associated low-level guilds are Crafters of Iris, for crafter characters, and Discipline, for merchants, so if you have characters doing those sorts of things, we can tuck them in there, too.

Most of our people are on British or European timezones. If you want to join us, send me a message here!

...so far, we have had one response from a level 30 titan, Darkstorm44. Well it's a start...

Damor was in touch to make a few tiny corrections to yesterday's post, which has been suitably updated. I'd been looking at Zedan's sorcerer, and asked her why a couple of his bits of armour were marked in red as "sealed" - apparently with horse or dragon armour if you die with a red name that is what happens, and before the armour works properly again you have to pay the archbishop some money, rather like the way that the animal trainer can unseal a dead pet. If Zedan's account has been hacked, as he says, though, is it worth spending time and money on things, when the hacker could return? The sorcerer has about -88% experience, as he got killed

repeatedly, which isn't much good. But I guess it would be fun to play a grown-up specialist sorcerer, at least briefly, I must make sure to choose some not very challenging monsters for my first attempt. Berserk Wolves, for instance...

Well my playing time wasn't actually very long today, and started a bit later than would have been ideal as the connection was playing up, but when I got that settled, SirDarth and Enchantrella were able to go out to the Treants again. Enchantrella ended up 43% of the way into level 24, which isn't bad as all she has to do is stand about and wait for a pink candy to drop, with 92 skill points now towards the 153 she needs for level two of Expert Armoursmith - and Darth, despite cutting back his rate of experience gain (to that he gets more skill points per level), is now 50% of the way through level 30, with 134 unused skill points - 129 of which could be used to max out one of his passive skills, but maybe we should hold on to them for the Templar Knight skills that come available at level 32? One things for sure, after giving those 500 skill points away to the guild, he has some more skill point farming to do.

My New Staff - June 23rd

On the mining front, Enchantrella beat Darth easily today - he crashed almost at once, but she kept on going for the best part of an hour, so my "when LC crashes, I can..." computer plans seemed in jeopardy for a while!

I tried out the specialist Sorcerer, Zedan, though it looked as if his real owner had been playing him a bit since last night, suddenly he actually had some money, and was in a guild! I changed over the sealed armour for the previous bits that were in storage, which while a set or so low for him were a lot better than nothing, and went out to bash a few Berserkers. Turning into that red winged devil is rather cool, and that, along with a skill called Stone Skin and some sort of electic bolt, meant he didn't do badly, though I didn't stay awfully long - the best bit of loot was a large defence potion, though a little more cash got added, and I went to Dratan to get a level 1 pony to help pick up the drops.

A level 5 mage on my account, on the other hand, who I just need to get to level 10, fought some Berserk Wolves and got a heaven stone...it's all in the luck of the draw. She levelled up enough to get her hammer and knife, for mining and farming; I'm guessing that merchant Geres will soon have her collecting wolf fangs for his necklace business.

The main part of the afternoon was devoted to SirDarth and Enchantrella - as this is the last day of the blue and pink candy drops, it was their last chance to team up against the Treants, probably, though I must admit that a cut-back in the skill exp Darth gets, more than balanced by the "free" experience and skill exp for Enchantrella, means it is something that could still be useful to do. It was Enchantrella's turn to get to 50% of the way through her level, though she still needs some more skill points before she can improve her Expert Armoursmith credentials. Darth got a few skill points too, of course, and a few percentage points of experience.

While we were out there, the level 30 titan Darkstorm44 rode out to meet us - but for the second time, recently, the result wasn't a new Norcaine member yet - he needs to serve out his 7 days between guilds. You can't leave a guild and go straight into another one, is the general rule...I've added a second post to my forum thread to remind people (such as me) about that. ANyway, Darkstorm44 seemed a suitable prospect for Norcaine - he did mention the occasional bout of pk'ing, but apparently he has a sorcerer who does that sort of thing. Personally I'm not into pk'ing, I tend to be on non-PvP servers where, if a knight rushes up to you, it's probably to give you a Divine Shield buff, rather than attempt to lop your head off...

After a while Damor got in touch, and invited Keerella to join her in Egeha. The aim was to get Kee to level 49, which was only 19% away, before she logged out - and me too, both of us were planning an early night, LC-wise. To start with, I just ks'd Damor's kills, which is faster than fighting Elite Goblins. What we needed was another person, hopefully a few levels above me, to team with, so that as before Damor could do 90% of the work and then teleport back to town, and the pair of us, assisted by Itura, could do the actual killing and share all the experience. Escadalia wasn't available, she was in merchant mode - and Zeratus wasn't answering my calls either, at the start. Luckily after a while he got back to his keyboard, and agreed to come out to c5 Egeha and help us. As he does have an active Recall card, Damor didn't have to use scrolls of memorising to return after each village trip. Things weren't 100% smooth, Damor had had a long day and was getting tired, but nobody died, except Itura once, and after taking about 40 minutes to go up 3% by ks'ing, the remaining 16% went by considerably faster - so I'm now level 49, with my fine new Darkwhite Staff +10, thanks to Damor - and with that final-stage boost from Zeratus too. Hmm, should I try to get my staff up a further couple of levels, I wonder? I need to do some serious skill point farming now.

Giant Larvas - June 25th

My young mage, Memree, put on another level - somehow she has avoided being given a free Energy Collector, but she got the quest reward and the energy collection skill. There doesn't seem any reason to spend 1000 gold to buy her one, one doesn't often need the results of that particular farming method. Enchantrella didn't last long at her mining attempt today, though at least she managed to finish her old hammer, which was down to 35 Endurance, out of 7200. For no particular reason, I'm keeping Memree in her starting outfit, which I'm attempting to get up to +4, so any level 1 items I find on the ground are quickly scooped up and taken to be changed into smelting stones. I did reach the point of trying to go from +3 to +4 on her outfit today, but three out of six pieces got ruined. A level 4 mage that I've never done anything with has transferred her outfit across, and is in the process of being deleted, so Memree is still properly dressed. At least her wand upgraded properly, so has its glow now - and any other spare wands that I convert into smelting stones, well, at least I get two stones for my 25 gold!

Keerella decided to go out to Merac's Giant Larvas rather than to Dratan's Elite Goblins, and, after a brief ride along from the Gnoll Lancers to get the location on the scroll of memorizing, things moved along comparatively quickly. They are level 50, and, when I got into a solo party, yielded a healthy 20,000 experience and 1045 skill exp. I had added an Extreme Stone to my new Darkwhite Staff, so it is now +12, and thus my total magic attack rating moved up from my old staff's 625 to 829...or 60 more with the horse buffs applied. It looks as if I'm going to be beaming down to the Giant Larvas (or Larvae) for quite a while, first of all I need to get up to 194 skill points for the final level of Flame Field, and then there are two other skills I've qualified for now, Fear and Freeze Arrow, both of them looking rather useful - while at level 50 there's the passive skill Magic Rod, which will permanently increase my physical defence and attack speed. In all, it's a lot of skill points - I do have 238 skill points saved in Armoursmithing, but they wouldn't get me very far.

Kaerella was online for a little while, after Silmarian, the low-level US-based mage who'd replied to the recruitment posting in the LC forums, got in touch with Kee; Silmarian is level 8 now, and has duly been recruited into Norcaine. When she's level 12 she wants her experience gain to be "frozen", so that she can farm the Sasquatches for skill points, so that's what we'll do, if suitably reminded. And Norcaine will get the experience she donates, as guild points, not that there appears to be anything to use them for unless we go up another level. Hmmm, I wonder how SirDarth would feel about being frozen at Berserker level for a few weeks, to farm 550 skill points...?

Fastdaggergirl1 was in touch, asking after Elvastar - and I had to say it was a bit of a mystery, he'd been going into hospital some weeks ago for the kidney stone operation, and we'd heard nothing since. If I'd known at that point that she was only 10 I might have been a little more circumspect, but it is a pretty routine operation, so we can only hope that he will be returned to us. She said that it made her feel like crying, and I had to agree. Oh, and she was asking if anyone had come across a player called Ladyyunalesca (probably, like Fast, without the capital letter), as she was a bit of a long-lost friend of hers, and she wanted to get back in touch. Anyone with information, well we have the sign-in book here at www.Kaerella.com or you can email Kaerella at a domain called gmx.com...not that I recommend them if you're looking for an online mail provider, their interface is a bit slow and complex.

Enchantrella had a trip to the Boucu Demons in Egeha - Damor had filled her inventory, so in return for the gift of some accessories, Enchie took half a dozen demon drops to sell to Merchant Geres, who pays pretty well for such things. The total selling value of the six items came to 1,419,866 gold, which can't be bad, though actually I held on to the level 71 mage Darkpeal Pants +1, which are rather nice...MistressDomino may well soon be seen wearing those!

The pink and blue candy is still dropping, for a third week, so maybe Darth and Enchantra will go out to the Treants a time or two more - today though I had to leave the blue candy on the ground, as MistressDomino was busy back in Randol selling things, in her usual spot in Cariae-3 between Sophia and the Animal Trainer - and SirDarth would have had problems tagging along with Kee, those Giant Larvas attack anyone who comes near, including pets and non-combatants. I did have a couple of fairly lengthy sessions out there solo, which brought me 7% more experience, and 59 new skill points, which is pretty good, a lot better than the Elite Goblins. It's partly a matter of pace, somehow it's all a headlong rush there in Merac, moving and fighting and killing, being attacked and responding and moving on, watching for respawns, and so on. By my calculations getting to the next level, 50, there should bring in around 776 more skill points, over the next couple of weeks probably (it would be just a bit too boring to spend all my time there, so other characters will be played too) - and that would be enough to finish Flame Field and get all levels of Fear and Freeze Arrow, and have enough points to get the first three levels of the level 50 passive skill Magic Rod. The fourth and fifth levels of that will need another 470 points, which will take us a fair way through level 50 to get...if Kee keeps farming until the end of that level, and July, she'll be able to "bank" some points in two levels of Armoursmithing too.

The special Item Mall offers this week seem to have an upgrading theme, with sale price Lucky Smelting Stones (as usual, the really cheap ones were all snapped up by the Americans before those of us on this side of the Atlantic woke up), "twofers" on Runes of Protection, and a package with an Extreme Stone and two Heaven Stones - Damor's theory is that this means there should be an "upgrade event" this coming weekend, where for an announced time using Heaven Stones to upgrade an item has an extra percentage chance to work. I hope I'll be able to be online then, my time over the next few days will be a bit limited - Kae has a staff (for future use) that needs work done on it, and Kee's next one could really do with a boost. It would be useful if Darth got the next sword up ready, too.

More Giant Larvas - June 26th

My rogue, Karella, is a pretty good herb harvester, so while I was busy all day she spent a fair bit of time out with her knife, gathering the herb leaves and herb trunks - very useful at the moment, as Kee's poor drake takes a lot of damage from the Giant Larvas. There were three or four crashes, but a lot of harvesting was achieved.

By the way, there are a few new screenshots recently added to the gallery's latest page here at www.kaerella.com, so do check them out, won't you?

So, only an evening session today, and that was spent out south of Merac's castle, battling the Giant Larvas. The place was actually quite busy, there was a Dutch team there as well and a couple of other solo fighters. I seemed to get quite a few blue candy drops which i couldn't pick up..annoying, particularly if no male characters are around to pick them up, the candy just lies there and one's silly drake keeps heading for it whenever you want him to pick up the latest gold drop.

Silmarian was in touch to ask for her "experience freeze" to begin, as she has now reached level 12, so after a few more minutes I switched to Kae and set her up with 100% experience donation. Escadalia contacted me too, with an invitation to somewhere exotic, the pyramid I think, but I had to say sorry, I'm skill point farming for the next two levels...

Well, I went up 12.5%, fighting flat out and using quite a few health pots and mana pots, as well as a candy cane or two left over from Christmas. 1490 pet points shows how busy I was - and 55 skill points, which meant that I could spend 194 sp on the fifth and final level of Flame Field, so that's one more skill sorted. I don't think I've ever tried to use that one, but I'm sure there are circumstances when it would be very useful. I hope.

I'll be able to start learning a new skill tomorrow, luckily lower levels don't cost as many skill points - it's usually only the fifth level that costs a lot. And the higher the level at which the skill becomes available, the more skill points it is liable to cost. Perhaps Fear ought to be next, it would be handy to be able to scare away a Giant Larva for a few seconds if it was trying to eat my poor drake...

Giant-Size Larva Team-Up - June 27th

Karella managed to get through another knife while harvesting herbs, despite a disconnection and a crash or three. The main reason that she gets to do some resource gathering is that people seem more likely to drop rogue knives and hammers, after discovering that they bought the wrong one for their character, than other kinds. One doesn't want to waste such things, right?

There was a "midnight raffle" last night, or an "8:00am raffle" as we'd call it in Britain, and it managed to reach a tier at which an hour or so's double experience was awarded, starting at 10:00am or soon after. According to Damor, it was still going on some hours later, my theory is that the GMs all went off to bed, and nobody was left to switch it off again.

Itura, Damor's level 49 cleric alter ego, got in touch with Karella to suggest that, if I lent her Kae's armour, as she doesn't have a very high-level set herself, a joint party to the Giant Larvas for Itura and Kee would be something we could do - so I switched to Kae, took the Recall to the normal Boucu Demon spot, and traded across, on loan, Kae's level 5/52 armour set (all +6 except one +10 item) and level 53 wand (also +6) - which Kae won't be able to use for a while as she's only level 42 at the moment. Itu kindly gave me some tool aids she'd got, which is handy as MistressDomino had just about run out of things to sell, after a very successful Wednesday night which left her with only a few Lucky Scrolls.

A little later Damor reported that she had been given a Chain of Tiger and a Pierce of Wind by that generous philanthropist, the Great Gold Dragon, and I took the opportunity to ask if she still had the Origin of Land she had offered Zeratus a day or two back for 6 million - and would it be a suitable accessory for SirDarth to use? She told me that she did still have it, and when I asked about the Chain of Tiger confirmed that it too was a useful thing for a knight to have - and I could buy the pair for 20 million. She also had got in her inventory two more items of the level 70/72 mage armour set that MistressDomino covets, and included them in the deal, so now Mistress D only needs the shirt part of the set, and does look rather smart. As she is only level 10 there would be a bit of an armour penalty if she wore that set outside town, but she does have a regular armour set too. I asked if Damor needed anything from the Item Mall, so we have arranged that I should repay her for the stuff by spending aeria points there for her as and when needed.

The teatime event started at five - very possibly it was still the raffle's bonus continuing! I decided that Kaerella was the one who could really benefit from double experience, and headed for Merac Jail. I teamed initially with KINGMEN, a rogue who at level 29 was rather pushing things by being there, particularly going to the far end of the first room and taking on two or three dire canine types at a time, but Greater Heal did its job and she did stay alive. A level 39 sorcerer called ArabianPrince joined, and after the rogue left suggested a trip to the Giant Larvas - which started well, but when Kae got caught between buffs by about three of them, she did unfortunately die. Still, 4% experience got added, and 8 more skill points... but it was awfully strange to have Kae teamed up with a sorcerer like Elva again...like Elva, but not Elva...

I changed to Keerella to go back there - the party still existed, as Mistress D had been in it from the start to ensure I got the "solo party" bonus, but ArabianPrince had left the area, pretty wisely as at his level you do need a healer there, and left the party too after a while. I took my revenge on the Giant Larvas, and before too long Itura got in touch, and came down to join me, which speeded things up a lot, and it was nice not to have to watch my health. It was fun to team with her, she was in a chatty mood and, well, the renewal of the horse buffs seemed to come round very quickly. She mentioned a small mistake on the 24th June entry I must put right, too, while mentioning how much she liked the blog, and that it was just as well there wasn't a "comment" function or she'd be contributing as much as I do. Damor rode down to join us - I wondered what that was about, but it was to transfer her top-class accessories across.

Kee went up about 11%, with the double experience, and gained 41 skill points, 23 of which have been used to get the first two levels of Fear, so that's a good start on that skill. Level three needs a few more points, but ought to be added tomorrow.

In fact, this blog entry is not quite being done at the end of my Last Chaos day, as I've promised to go back in for a spawning of gold-bearing kung-fu pandas, er, pandora's beasts, to team up again with Itura, who knows how such events work. More on that next time!

And a Guest Report from Damor! - June 27th

After my breath had calmed down and my sweat stopped dropping from my head to the floor, I was able to start my PC to get my usual Friday after-college routine going (yes 12km at more than 20km/h under 30 degrees causes these things even though I am in good condition). This routine consists of checking mail, reading news and blogs, checking some browser games, and finally start LC. After the usual entering of my password and user name I popped up on C1, waiting for the rendering of the surroundings to finish, I remembered I had missed bringing a book back yesterday, so my extra time means an extra cost will have to be paid, sigh. The browsing through shops was very brief this time, as not many had set up a shop close to the fountain, known as the location for lvl 70+ stuff. As usual, no mage blue stuff set to give you the best evasion (there's other blue stuff, like additional defence, on the armor pieces, but that's not considered as useful as evasion).

So, there was nothing to delay an attempt to get a lift to Egeha - however I didn`t started the usual way, asking all the online people on my friends list, but logged on to every server, joining all solo parties there and hoping someone high level in the party was in Egeha. At the second server I tried (c3), I had success. The drawback was that I found my favourite spot (known as "main") taken, so I asked if the people partying there could kindly whisper me once they left. And about 30 mins later this was the the case, as the GGD had shown up. That also pulled my intention back from Boucu Demons and I started to attack the GGD, though without using skills as I didn't want my mana to go down uselessly, but just to make the GGD feel busy so that he wouldn't fly away. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find someone in my friends list in the mood to help me kill him, so I had no option other than taking a mana stealer and starting firing all I have (Freeze Arrow, Terra Spear, Chaos Nova). I slogged away about 20% of its hp in one buff time.

While the fourth buff time was running, the usual group of weavers spawned, so I pulled out my horse and went to town, in order to use a memorizing scroll and pop up close to him, but not in the range where the weavers would start to attack me. Carefully I went close to him, and cast my Sloth on the GGD - then he attacked me, the weavers still standing around, waiting on the first kill, spawning to check the spot. The rest of the Great Gold Dragon`s hp went down without any problems, as my (rather bad) evasion armor and my three Stones of Shadow were able to make the GGD always miss me. Shortly before he died I took an item drop booster and a lucky scroll to maximize my chances of a rare drop, and indeed the "chicken" left a Pierce of Wind under its dead body, quickly picked up by me. After that I got Itura, my cleric, to come to the spot, buffed myself again and started killing demons with their usually 880 skill exp and 1,595,214 experience.

After about an hour, Davest8ion asked me whether I wanted to kill the GGD on another server. So I replied yes, logged out, and found myself recalled, after logging in, in an area with Little Scorpionmantis monsters, with the GGD in sight, I instantly ran to him and start attacking him, quickly checked my friends list (no high level people on), took another mana stealer and again brought him down, and this time he dropped me a Chain of Tiger, not worth as much as a Pierce of Wind, but two good drops from two GGDs, very nice. Right after killing him I went back to c3, got recalled by a friend I'd brought there earlier, and continued with demons - and after a short time a third GGD spawned above me. As my mana stealer hadn't finished I started attacking him too, and got him to 30% of his hp before my stealer finished. I did the rest without taking a new one as they cost me 1.5 million gold each, rather more slowly and with attack minerals without "cheating". This time he didn't drop me anything; a possible reason is that a knight passed by and conc'd me; I didn't use an item drop booster as its part of the game code that the player who buffed me would get the killing blow. I continued for a few more hours demon fighting, including a short visit from one of Kee`s characters; she got my Chain of Tiger and (from a day or two ago) my Origin of Land, in return to promising to sell me some Item Mall things when I need them. She got a pretty good bargain - well, protect your ap seller as well as you can, a good ap provider is as rare as the GGD!

After perhaps five hours of slogging demons I got too bored to continue, though I added 25 skill points and 20% of the experience needed to level. There was an double experience event going, but I don't really care as I don't want to level at the moment, I want to see the new skills first and decide if its worth getting them, as I farm better at level 80 than I would at level 90. So I took a break, and went to watch TV and eat a bit. At about 8pm CESST I logged on in LC again in order to team up with Keerella as we had discussed before,but this time not with my main character Damor, but with Itura my level 49 cleric who needs more sp very much. After figuring out where she was with the help of the Norcaine guild channel I had to walk all over Merac as I had not done for about three months, as Itura doesn't have her own mount. Shortly before arriving at the Giant Larvae I reminded Keerella to register for a party to make it easier to find her. Once I managed that, we started to slog away, it felt very slow as I killed them slower than demons, but fortunately Kee crushed them more quickly so I could use some of her gained skill exp too. In exchange she got the cleric skill Charm, which adds 50 more to her magical attack, and a healing every now and then, though she didn't need it as much as Damor did at that level, I think because of the 3 Pierce of Winds she is wearing and her better armor, I think at her level Damor still had a 45/47+4 set. Thinking of Kee`s rares I got the idea to temporarily transfer my SoS from Damor to Itura as she needs them more at the moment. Seconds after I finished with that, the Larvae damage went down by an incredible amount, I could kill for two full buff times without any healing needed. The skill points itself went up more quickly than they had for a long time too, I made 21 skill points in a very short time, more than I expected. We decided to take a break, and team up later when a pandora event was due to start. After I logged back in for that event, we had a couple of misunderstandings about the time and places of the pandas, but finally we managed to kill a whole group of them, adding 500k to each of our inventories.

and back to me - drafted before I read Damor's entry...

The Pandora spawn last night was a little late, which was just as well as I had a little trouble getting back in to Last Chaos, but Itura and I placed ourselves where, she thought, it was a good bet that a mob of assorted Pandora Beasts would be spawned. To pass the time I started killing the local Butchers - it was strange, while they tended to give me about 400/500 experience and 1 skill exp, Itura, exactly the same level as me, was only getting 4/6 experience from them. Unfortunately, when the announcement finally came, there were none to be seen there, and it was a matter of riding round Merac looking for the glowing, ghostly beasts - I had the advantage after we split up, having a horse, and covered a fair amount of ground, before finally being able to type in "here"!

Unfortunately Itura didn't read that, she was busy typing in "pff, none here" and "I'll try c2", sigh...with relogging, it took a while before she got my messages, but eventually she came running back. It was a big group of the beasts, with level 20, 30, 40, and 50 ones, glowing werewolves, spiders, and other shapes, some giving extra experience, some extra skill exp even, and quite a number giving good gold drops. I only went up 0.71% in experience, and gained 2 skill points (plus 37 pet points) - but on the gold front I went up about 800,000, which is always useful. I think Itura mentioned getting about 500,000, but then, she did arrive late. We looked round a bit more, in case there were any other undiscovered groups, but we didn't find any more. As it was getting rather late, we both logged out.

Another Short Day - With Pandas - June 28th

Karella managed about an hour of herb harvesting before crashing, and I think SirDarth later on lasted even longer at the mines - unlike Sheele, who vanished pretty quickly, though hurried back.

For someone who wouldn't be able to actually play until the evening, I seemed to keep fairly busy. Enchantrella used her weapon-making skills to create a level 57 Puplern Crossbow for Sheele, and a level 53 Peaceglory Wand for Itura - there is supposed to be around a 25% chance of failure, where the manual remains but all the materials vanish, but we were lucky. Unfortunately Itura needed the 40 ToolAids back that she'd recently given me, so that she could get the raw materials needed, but she did return the last remaining one later. I suspected that they both had their sights on upgrading these items when the special extra-chance-of-success "upgrade probability event" started. Someone in town heard Enchantrella mentioning the Peaceglory Wand, as she confirmed that that was the item she should make - Damor discovered that he actually had a +12 one for sale, and urged me to buy it for Kae at 30 million, saying that was a good price. I bought it, and I've lent it to Itura - I've sold them the +6 one Itura had been using, Damor paid a generous 8 million for it, another candidate for upgrading I'm sure. Damor was surprised to find another unidentified Origin of Land in her inventory, and passed that over temporarily, with the hope that that would make another one magically appear tomorrow...I decided to buy it also, so Darth now has three top-classs accessories to make his grind easier.

Darkstorm44 had finished his "between guild" seven days, and came out to Darth at the mine to join Norcaine - so that gives us another Highlander type titan, it's good to get some new blood into the guild - it was also good to see Sheele about.

When I was finally able to actually play, I checked the website, only to see that I'd missed another Pandora's Beasts spawning by about an hour - a bit soon after last night's excitements. So I teamed with Itura again down down at the Giant Larvas, or Giant Larvae if you have a classical eductation and go for Latin plurals - and after a little while Sheele joined us, though she did get a few disconnections. It didn't take her long to ride back, though. On one of her rides, she spotted a newly-spawned group of Pandora's Beasts, and used Recall to take us over to her. We despatched them, and riding around found a couple more groups, though we did have to share them with other people. Some of the Pandas are as bad at pet-eating as the larvae, and Sheele's drake did get killed - mine got pretty low, I completely ran out of herbs again. The idea would be for us only to kill the level 50 Pandas, and leave the 40, 30 and 20 ones for lower-level characters, but sometimes they attacked together...in the end Sheele was using Recall to remove us from their aggro range.

The Pandas meant that Kee added about 1.8 million to her bank account, which was useful. All told, Kee went up 7% in experience, and added 26 skill points - 22 of which went on getting level three of the skill Fear. Oh, and 721 pet points got added, with Greedo bravely trying to pick up all the cash.

The Upgrade Probability Event was due to start at 10:00pm uk time, and Damor had big plans, hoping to make another +15 weapon or two to finance her next few levels - Sheele was hoping to do some upgrading also, and, as long as my Runes of Protection held out, I was planning to do some self-improvement as well. For Kee, that meant trying to improve an upcoming level 57 Blood Shadow Staff, without any joy at all - six heaven stones and six runes of protection II used, but it ended at only +10 - but at least Kae got her current level 45 Storm's Eye to +10, and the level 49 Sainningpollars Wand to +10 as well, after much use of heaven stones and runes of protection I. If that's what happens when the chance of success is double, remind me never to try such things at the normal odds! Things aren't too bad up to +10, it's trying to go further, with the chance of an item being knocked back to +10 again, that is the problem.

A Late Start - June 29th

After being out all day, it was a relief to start up the computers, and log in to Last Chaos in good time for the Sunday evening Quiz at seven, UK time... but as the crowds grew around the domain merchant, it became apparent that something was wrong - and finally an announcement confirmed that the quiz was going to have to be later. Possibly two or three hours later, though the time on the website translated as 9:30 UK time. It would make sense to have the Quiz then, rather than while the usual tea-time bonus event was running, but a lot of people who usually go to the Quiz weren't too happy as they couldn't be on that much later...

Itura and Damor seem to have had mixed fortunes in last night's upgrade possibility event - Damor got all her mage armour up to +10 (after leading us on to spend so many aeria points on runes of protection, right at the very end of the event, after I was offline, the finks increased the success probability further, to, as far as I can gather, what we'd been told earlier that it already was), but Itura broke her supply of mage wands, hopefully not including the one I lent her. After my busy day I was a bit tired, and while I gladly accepted some freebie old healer armour items, to transfer to a storage character at some point, stuff started to get complicated - once I'd worked out what Itura was asking, I had to change to Enchantrella to tell her the ingredients needed to make more wands... Enchantrella has two of the necessary manuals, one of which may be actually mine, and one of which may actually be Itura's, and I have no idea what I ought to charge for the one that is mine...

We had yesterday discovered why Itura had been getting so little experience from the Butchers, while we waited for the panda spawn - she was set to donate 99% of her experience gain to the guild. As she does actually want to level up, as she gets a new skill at level 50, that needed changing, and duly was changed to zero.

Itura had been talking about teaming with Kee against the Giant Larvae again, but had apparently already spent about five hours down there today, so was tired of them, sigh. So she'll level up and stop going there well before I get anywhere...which is a pity, as it is a great help to have a healer with one when fighting those ugly great things, and of course Itu is good company. I think there was some sort of football game on the television.

The Quiz, when it came, was a bit of a mess - there was almost no countdown for the first question, so that before people could choose the X or O side, they were booted out into Randol. Most of us dashed back in, and got a few questions right - including which game appeared first, Ultima Online or Meridian (?), which foxed a few people. Like a lot of players, I kept on dashing back in, reloading the area and running through hoping that the quiz wouldn't choose that moment to boot out everyone who wasn't on the correct half of the floor. I answered a few questions correctly - and that included the one that gave out the 5 Heaven Stones! Damor got the 10 Tool Aids question right too, she was sprinting around her room getting all three of her characters back in, and they all got 5 Heaven Stones each, which shows great coordination, and luck. All in all, a chaotic few minutes! I didn't realise that if you got the appropriate question right, you got the same reward as people who'd been in there getting questions right the whole time.

Well, after that Damor and Itura went off to use their newly-acquired ToolAids to get the materials to make one level 53 Peaceglory Wand - and I changed to Enchantrella, got the ingredients from Itura, used the manual, and had another successful weapon creation - I handed it over to Itura, wished her good luck with her upgrading, and logged out. Another "upgrade event" would keep me up too late, and be too expensive in runes of protection, I just hope Kee's future staff, downgraded repeatedly during yesterday's attempts, gets another "upgrade love" event coming along for it.

Reading her "guest blog", it's no wonder Damor is so successful - she works at it, she concentrates, she puts in the hours. I only managed about an hour with the Giant Larvae before the quiz - despite the double experience I just went up 5.5%, and only added 23 skill points, so not enough for the next level of Fear yet. 680 pet points, and still a long way to go for Greedo's next level - he continues to get attacked by the larvae just as much as I do, a pity he can't use the Pierce of Wind accessories.

Back to Normal - June 30th

Karella has been busy farming herbs to keep Greedo's health bar up - "Greedo" being the unofficial name for Keerella's drake. It was nice to have a proper amount of time to play and generally mess about today, after the short hours of recent days - Memree, my level 9 mage, now has a full +4 "fairy set" of the starting mage armour set, with the circlet and wand also similarly plussed. I did make an attempt to get the wand up to +5, but it was "ruined", lucky I'd already made a +4 replacement for it.

After various short adventures and general trading of items between characters, it was about a quarter past three UK time. Itura logged on just as Kee was heading across Randol to get to the teleporter for Merac, to say that she needed to do an hour's homework, and then would be available for a team-up fighting the Giant Larvae - to which I replied that I was going to head for them and fight for about an hour before I vanished for food! I rejected the suggestion that I should eat an hour early, as that would have made a ludicrously long evening, and Itu decided to pospone her academic essay-writing, so we could both fight them together.

So that's what we did - Itura used a couple of Blood Frenzy scrolls, it looked to me as if by hitting her in that form the larvae were causing themselves damage, which would be rather clever. Later she went afk for a while, standing just by a tree close to one wall; it must be a safe spot I suppose, as no nearby larvae attacked her.

As part of the 1000 aeria points I owe her, Itura asked for a Bonus Book of Melding, and a cover for her wand - so I spent 224 aeria points on those, and transferred them over, though not until I was safely back in Merac. And Itu very kindly passed over a spare cover for a mage staff she had; apparently they can't be used on high-level weapons like the one Damor is now using. My main account is actually rather short on aeria points at the moment, partly because of buying all those Runes of Protection II for that evil "upgrade probability event", and partly because the last lot I bought never turned up in my in-game Mall inventory. So, after allowing the Aeria Games people a few days to get things sorted out, I've finally sent them a complaint.

Kee got enough skill points before tea for me to be able to get level 4 of Fear, for 54 points - level 5 needs another 194, though. I bought the required Bonus Book of Melding for myself, and, following Itu's instructions, carefully added the strange cover to my mage staff. The possible bonus was from +1 to +3, and, wouldn't you know it, I got the +1 - it all helps, but boy is the thing ugly! I think in town I'll put it away, though that means I'll have to remember to equip it before teleporting larvae-wards.

Darkstorm 44 was able to get his friend Galadorius to meet Kaerella in Randol, so we were able to enroll him in the guild - after only playing for a week he's already level 28, so he's working well...and he manages to fit in the occasional hour of Call of Duty too! Zeratus also took the opportunity to have his level 21 rogue recruited.

Anyway, I went back to the Giant Larvae after that, and arrived there at almost the same time as Itura, and a lengthy and productive session ensued. At one point, when I went far enough round the far corner of the Giant Larvae area to see a Cerebril, and mentioned the Salamander Ruins, Itu decided to run off to the main "Sally Ruin" point, to check out how they compared with our regular foes. It's just as well I have a horse, as it was difficult to keep up with her! We fought some, and the Cerebril that they pal up with, but while they have the advantage of not being pet-eaters, Itura decided that there really weren't enough of them to sustain a full-scale assault, we'd be running from one end to the other in search of targets, and thus would be farming rather more slowly. The supply of Giant Larvae is just about endless! So back we went, to the usual warm welcome.

Kee made 53 skill points today, and went up by 11% on the experience side, which took me to halfway through level 49.. Just over 2000 pet points too, but it will still be a while before Greedo levels up. There was a special "unlimited rebate" offer on resurrection scrolls, and their close relations that restore either the experience or skill points lost when one is killed - that is a preparation for the new patch, only a day away now, so it looks as if the GMs think we are going to die a lot when Evasion is reduced in usefulness, and monster skills get tweaked. I bought a few; Itura was saying that it is possible to trade them in merchant mode now, or transfer them, but it may not be after the patch. Times are about to get interesting! I just hope my Pierce of Wind accessories don't lose too much of their value and usefulness.

Keerella's Blog - stardate June 2008 (2)

More Treants - June 16th

Enchantrella did try some mining, using the long-term ore mines for a change, rather than the quickly-used-up ore veins; she lasted rather longer, too, but did crash in the end. I can see that I may well have to start using tool aids, something I've always avoided doing. Later in the day, Zeratus reported that he had also had a mining session ended by "Send error message?", so let us hope that this is a known issue, or bug, that will soon be worked out.

MistressDomino did some selling overnight, and sold out of the Tool Aids she was carrying (though there are plenty more in storage, after Damor sold me over a hundred yesterday at a suitably bargain price - we couldn't do the exchange in one attempt, you can't trade if it means your weight will go above 100%), and also sold all the pink and blue candy I'd got so far. I'd decided to sell them at 50,000 each, which seemed to be the lowest price one actually saw around - though there are plenty of people trying for 200,000 or more! When she came out of merchant mode, it was a little bit strange, as she couldn't browse other people's shops, the window just wouldn't open when she clicked on them. Another minor bug...

So, SirDarth and Enchantrella went out to the Treants, in their usual "combat party" way. The experience varies from one Treant to the next, but they get exactly the same skill exp, for example 497 each (though the figure was sometimes as high as 600), while on the same Treant Darth gets 3370 experience and Enchantrella, for doing nothing but standing there waiting in case a pink candy drops, gets 527 experience points. Drops seem to be shared equally; it may be because Darth is doing the fighting that more blue candy than pink seems to drop, but it rather defeats the avowed aims of this week if the candy gets randomly distributed between them when it is picked up, surely Darth should get the blue candy, and Enchie should get the pink? It doesn't matter to me, the items that MistressDomino will be selling get exchanged across to Darth at the end of the session anyway.

Zeratus has started a new rogue on a second account, mainly to use as a merchant, and got Captianjack to help him move some items across to her, so that she can afford armour etc. I commented that rogues as merchants are a bit small to see, sitting hunched up on the ground - which is one reason that there are a lot of mage merchants, since their equivalent of sitting is hovering in mid-air. A rogue on horseback is fine, but I don't think any character sitting on a dragon is much good, the "shop sign" is so far above their heads that it's hard to see who it belongs to. Zeratus got his rogue to level 10, and I think he said he'd a mage that was almost there too.

There was an unfortunate incident when I was on my food break. I'd left SirDarth and Enchantrella by the entrance to Velpist Temple, and when I happened to look at the screen, they were being attacked by three Elder Drakes! Sadly, Enchantrella was killed, as these are aggressive beasts, but Darth then managed to kill them. It was strange, usually that area is completely clear, and the Elder Drakes are well away - I rather suspect that an annoying rogue called Waiyung might have had something to do with it, she has ks'd, taken a pink candy one of my Treants dropped before Enchantrella could get to it, asked for a party, called me a "lier" when, after saying that I would soon be logging out, I was still fighting after a couple of minutes, drawn some Treants across where I was resting and then accused me of ks-ing when I fought one of them, and asked for a party again. She is the Last Chaos player I'd least like to party with!

While she was back in town Enchantrella used her store of skill points to start learning how to craft armour, rather than continue with material processing at the moment. Then Darth and Enchie, after that slight setback, continued to slog away at the Treants. Enchantrella is now halfway through level 23, and has spent 238 skill points to learn Basic Armoursmith and Advanced Armoursmith (3 levels each); Expert Armoursmith will take rather more to learn, but at least she has 9 skill points towards the 120 needed for its first level...153 and 179 points will be needed after that for the other two levels.

SirDarth is now 72% into level 28, and his drake has reached level 26, and is at 2424/5639 towards his next level. And the unused skill point tally has risen to 649, so we aren't doing badly.

Trick or Treant - June 17th

Enchantrella actually avoided crashing at the mine today, though she didn't actually stay very long. At least I think I've finally worked out how to make sure that mining does actually start when it ought to, now, though this has nothing to do with the crashing - if you find that the "Endurance" of your hammer is not going down, just, without stopping mining, sit down and stand up again, and with any luck you'll be in business.

After various exchanging around of accessories and cash and pan flutes, which took about an hour, including trips to that wacky archaeologist in Dratan City, it was time to get SirDarth and the loyal Enchantrella back into action out by Velpist Temple against the Treants again. So that's how I spent the rest of the afternoon, and almost all of the evening too.

Captianjack got in touch to say that a real life friend of his, a level 20 mage called Sabalonn, wanted to join Norcaine, which was good news - but after Kaerella had made the trip to Cariae-4's Randol to chat and recruit, we eventually came up against the "wait one week after leaving a previous guild" rule. Still, with any luck Cap will arrange for her to contact us next Tuesday. As a guild it is difficult to promise much help in the grind to level up, but when the time comes we will, hopefully, see what we can do. Another active mage in Norcaine would be good.

Soon after eight o'clock, Darth levelled up to level 29 - and while the Treants' names are green now, they seem to be giving just as much experience as before - or maybe a little more, in this "combat party" arrangement. Before, the maximum skill exp for a kill was 600, now 626 or even 632 is possible. The experience figure varies a lot, but 3543 has been seen, which seems well up to standard. Given that Darth is carrying almost 700 unused skill points, staying away from Merac, and its possibility of a sudden arrival by the Great Red Dragon, seems sensible, until level 30 is reached. And this way Enchantrella continues to get experience, and, more importantly, skill exp. Of course, each level requires more experience than the one before, so that each Treant is only worth .04 or .05% now, so progress is slowing down.

Enchantrella is now almost three-quarters of the way through her level, with 55 unused skill points; SirDarth is 12% of the way into level 29, with 695 spare skill points - though of course 500 of them will be used to get Norcaine up to the sixth rank of guilds. Some more pink and blue candies have dropped, but the price of these items is coming right down, as one might expect. Last night's selling price of 35,000 gold now seems rather high...

Disconnections & Deaths - June 18th

SirDarth picked up a few minor quests, such as visiting the archaeologist-type out in Dratan desert - it was good to see that his encampment hadn't changed much since the old version of the map - and collecting some items that Butchers dropped in Merac, and turning them in for a reward. These quests provided a small but useful experience boost; it was interesting to see that the level 28 Butchers didn't give as much experience, in a solo party, as the level 26 Treants do in a combat party. Darth was careful to keep an easy escape route open while fighting the Butchers in case the GRD turned up, but all was quiet. The solo party was with Enchantrella, who waited patiently in Randol while Darth rode around the desert, and fought his way through the Butchers northwest of Merac Caron...and then Darth and Enchantrella went out to the Treants, in an area that seems to attract annoying young rogues.

After an hour or so, though, Damor got in touch, with an invitation for Kee to join her, Itura and Escadalia in Egeha for some Boucu Demon fighting, so I changed character appropriately, headed for Cariae-5, and joined the party. And it all went pretty well, to begin with. Damor even did some of the real "power levelling", where she vanishes back to the village when the demon is down to about 5 to 10% health, so that Esca and I share all the experience, rather than just taking a small (to Damor) proportion of the experience by "ks-ing" her kill. The deal was that we passed all the loot we picked up over to her, which was certainly fair enough. It added up to very nearly a quarter of a million from me, for the first session, so no wonder Damor likes to go there to raise cash; the only good drop had been allocated to Itura anyway.

We continued, back to ks-ing, for a while, and then Damor decided that we'd do a whole hour of power-levelling, and advised us both to use the special triple-strength experience Iris boosters, one of which I'd been holding on to for just such an occasion. For the first half hour things were fine, but then my connection went flakey. And when one lags out, well, that means that as far as everyone else (demons included) is concerned, one just stands there, within range of where the demon will respawn. So, death. There was another death soon after that was a little more normal, we just couldn't kill the demon after Damor left...maybe it had slightly more health left than sometimes, and maybe our attacks just happened to miss more often than usual, but in the end Itura couldn't keep up with the healing, and Damor's "Sloth" spell ran out... and while I usually keep that skill handy, as I was only just back I hadn't set it up yet. My connection got worse then, with me disconnecting within minutes of managing to re-log in...and then I just couldn't log in, I kept getting the "timed out" message - which, since a Platinum Blessed Iris counts down its expensive hour "regardless of connection time", was more than a little frustrating. The rest of the internet was fine, but connecting to the Last Chaos server just didn't happen.

Modem restarts, game restarts...nothing seemed to work. My older upstairs machine managed to connect, so that Darth was able to send a message - and then I logged Kee in on it, and joined the party once more. That was a bit of a mistake, as the older machine has its limitations, and the low-power graphics card means that brightness options are greyed out, so that some places get awfully dark. When Egeha finally loaded, I went forward, got on my mount to get horse buffs - and suddenly got attacked by a demon, which must have spawned a bit nearer to the middle than usual. So a third death...and my horse died too. Getting a level 38 mount "unsealed" costs 373,996 gold, which is a little expensive. By then the Iris hour was just about up, so that was the end of the adventure, and I went off for some much-delayed food.

When I spoke to them later both Escadalia and Damor were very sympathetic. Damor let me keep the level 72 rogue boots that I'd picked up as loot, and a pink candy or two, which was kind. Escadalia was telling me that after my departure, Damor took her off to the mysterious Pyramid; Escadlia only needed another 14% to level up for a second time...but some deaths in that unfamiliar territory (well, unfamiliar to me, anyway) mean that she now needs 20%. So maybe it was just as well I wasn't available for that little trip...as it was, I did end up 5 skill points down, but 72% up on the levelling, which is pretty good for an Egeha trip really, and a little way into level 48, with 580 more pet points too. Of course if the connection had behaved I might be within hailing distance of level 49, when Kee can start to use her next +10 staff, but another Egeha adventure or two should get me there. Level 49 is what I am aiming for...but I do have the gloves I'll be able to wear at level 50, too!

Well, I returned to Darth and Enchantrella, and after all the upheaval my connection behaved perfectly. There was one strange moment when someone ran towards where we were fighting a few Treants, bringing three Elder Drakes with him, but they didn't show any interest in us, and wouldn't have done Darth any great amount of harm anyway, though Enchantrella might have had to run for it. Enchantrella now has 75 skill points towards her armour-making skills, and is 82% of the way through level 23, while Darth is 35% of the way through level 29 now, with 719 unused skill points. So he is on target and on schedule.

Back To Normal - June 19th

Enchantrella did a little mining without crashing at lunchtime, which had led me to hope that the crashing problem associated with that might have been overcome. The mine area is still suspiciously quiet, though, and I'd say that the price people are charging for quality stones was higher. When I was getting a new pony recently from the loony, er, I mean, NPC, in Dratan City, I actually read through his strange ramblings, and it seems to explain why one's pony, or horse, eats stones rather than, say, oats. It isn't a real pony, it's a statue of one...

The new Last Chaos front page on the Aeria games website has some interesting pictures, with a mage, a healer, and a third female character shown at the top - in fact, it is a female sorcerer, and at the bottom the sorcerer statistics have a female face by them, with elvish pointy ears. Today's newsletter also shows some forthcoming top-level armours, and the sorc set also looks remarkably feminine. So the sorcerers among us may well get a bit of a shock some week after the newest patch...

Well SirDarth and Enchantrella went out in the afternoon to Treant Central, as usual; I'll be glad when the blue and pink candy drop fortnight is over, I just don't like leaving stuff on the ground so I have to send out a team of male and female characters when normally I'd solo it, or one type of candy would just lie there. Though the chance to get Enchantrella some experience and skill exp, at only a small sacrifice in Darth's skill exp gain, is rather useful as a one-off. In all, Darth added 12% before the tea break (and moved his skill point total on to 734), when he and Enchantrella both headed for the mine. As Enchantrella was on the upstairs computer, I set her to one of the low-level Ore Mines, with Darth on an Ore Vein - when I checked back downstairs after a few minutes, though, I could see that Enchie had stopped mining - when I went upstairs, the old "Send Error Message?" window was on display. Darth himself lasted until just about the end of the break, before he too crashed out. So the problem does still exist.

Damor had told me, mid afternoon, that a level 49 mage staff, +12, was on sale at 35 million; as Kee is less than a level away from out-growing it, it hardly seemed worth purchasing, though Damor commented that she thought it could be sold for 40. And then, during the food break, she sent word that there might be an impending trip to Egeha...

Actually, it wasn't impending, as things turned out she arranged to help someone other than Escadalia level for a while, someone who didn't find having a spare mage around useful, so I had time to do some shopping. SirDarth transferred the two level 33 Eagle Swords that I'd been saving over from my junior, storage knight, and also the Glorious Gauntlets he'll be able to wear at level 30, if he can plus them a bit. The spare sword was swiftly converted into two smelting stones, both of which worked, which was very lucky as they generally have a one in three chance of successfully upgrading an item. I bought a level 33 sorcerer's fallarm from somebody in merchant mode for 20,000 gold, and made that into smelting stones, and the second of those worked as well, giving me a +3 weapon. I took a "threefer" (three lucky smelting stones for the price of two, a special offer from a few weeks ago) out of Mall storage, and used them to get the sword up to +6, so now Darth has, instead of a Light of Odin +6 sword doing 83 + 34 damage, an Eagle Sword +6 doing 92 + 38.

So, with Damor busy elsewhere, it was back out to the Treants, hopefully the last day but one for this particular slog, unless I get called away to Egeha tomorrow. After a while a GM message came up saying "You have 20 minutes to kill everything! Better work fast." Actually some GM had hit the wrong button, or forgotten that his words would go out server-wide, because it just referred to a "Storm The Castle" event being held in Merac. Zeratus was there - but the monsters weren't, some GM (probably Moose) forgot to hit some other button, at least for a few minutes, until it did finally get under way. But it led me to thinking that a message like that could make for a fun event on its own - with everyone who was on Juno rushing around trying to kill every single monster on the map before a deadline was reached, with monster respawning switched off of course. Hard luck on any pet levellers afk-ing away, and one would have to check the places they hide, but generally it would make a busy time for everyone.

By the end of the evening, Enchantrella had just levelled up to level 24, and Darth had reached the 73% mark, with 763 unused skill points - his drake has nearly caught him up too, at level 28. With 500 skill points needed to upgrade the Norcaine guild, and 228 points needed for the level 30 skill Mana Break, Darth has made his target safely - except for the little detail of actually reaching level 30, that is!

Life at Thirty - June 20th

Darth did a couple of crashes' worth of mining, just to get a few stones, while MistressDomino continued a lengthy overnight selling session right up to lunchtime, taking in a satisfactory bit of cash, which is always useful. After lunch, it was time for the fearless SirDarth, and the intrepid Enchantrella, to head back to the terrible trees, the Treants.

And so the time passed, with only the occasional drop of a piece of candy to keep things interesting. At four o'clock the forum thread for the Saturday "Upgrade Love" event was due to open, so I made sure I was logged in there, and when the hour was reached, I was ready to pounce. Unfortunately, the system wasn't ready - on the "shoutbox" a forum mod said the whole thing was on a timer, so he couldn't interfere or he might break the whole arrangement - so why was the timer set to start things late, I wonder? Still, at around ten past the threads for the various servers were unlocked, and it was possible to compose one's post. Of course the forums have a wonderful system where they won't accept a new post if another post has been made while it was being composed, which is normally a good idea, as it stops you being "snaked" by a new answer to a topic, but with these sign-ups it is incredibly annoying - but on the fourth of fifth attempt I actually got to register, the eighth person on the Cariae server to do so, four ahead of fellow guildie Psykore. By the end of the half hour, actually, less than 50 people had posted to the Cariae thread, so I needn't have hurried! Last time they did this I missed the afternoon (well, 8:00am Pacific Time) sign-up because my internet went down, and had to stay awake for the second chance at one in the morning, uk time, so things had got better.

After that it was time for a slightly early food break, so that I'd be back in time to take full advantage of the EU "Happy Hour", scheduled to start at five and last two hours, with double experience. Darth and Enchantrella had stayed on-site, so were back in action in time...though it wasn't until 5:26 by my computer-clock that the event was actually switched on! Still, it lasted until 8:47, which can't be bad.

Anyway, Darth got to level 30 at last, not long into the event, so Kaerella promoted him to Guild Master, he took 2,000,000 gold out of storage, and he went to the guard captain, and upgraded Norcaine to level six. The big change this makes is to the "manage guild" window, reached from the "G" pop-up window and its "guild" tab...it's a lot bigger now, with various options, and shows guild member levels and which map the online people are playing...though this seems not to be reliable, it told me that a couple of people who were actually in Merac were in Juno. The bit with the available skills is on one of a number of tabs - but it lists our guild points as zero, ignoring all those red carnations we collected, sigh.

After reinstating Kae as Guild Master, Darth went and got his five levels of the Mana Break skill, which cost slightly more skill points than expected, as to get it required at least the first level of three other skills he'd not previously acquired - and then he and Enchantrella headed out into Merac to fight the Butchers northwest of town. This worked pretty well, with some Pilferers also falling before Darth's blade, but after a while I decided to head back, as an experiment, to the Treants, and found that they still give a fair amount of experience and skill exp in "combat mode" with Enchie, almost as much as the Butchers - and of course you can fight them almost as quickly as you can kill them, you don't have to run around all the time from one to the next, so it looks as if, for experience per hour, they are still hard to beat. And there was me thinking I'd seen the last of them with Darth...

Some more investigation of the new guild stuff is needed - I think Kae needs to go to our guild hall and talk to the NPC there. Damor (who has now reached level 80, she just told me!) should be able to help me sort things out; if necessary Itura, as she is in Norcaine, can take over as guild master for a little while to arrange things. But as for Darth, the pressure is off now. It would be nice to make him into a templar knight, but there is plenty of time for that. He got 25% of the way into level 30, anyway, and now is carrying a more reasonable 74 unused skill points instead of ten times that many. And Enchantrella got the first level of Expert Armoursmith too.

Upgrading - June 21st

Enchantrella tried some mining today, but at both lunchtime and teatime she crashed out during the second sequence - so at least a few stones were acquired. The quietness of the usual mining area north of Randol shows that this is still a big problem. I did actually buy some quality stones in town, just to keep my stocks up - quality stones in particular will be needed if Enchantrella needs to use her weapon and armour crafting skills.

Well, I fiddled around with a few minor characters, and Keerella browsed the various Cariae sub-servers on the lookout for useful stuff, but the best thing she found was just a level 33 +4 shield for SirDarth. However, Damor came on after a while, and I was asking her about the way to set up the guild, now that Norcaine has reached level six and has access to the big, wide guild control window.

Very kindly, Damor temporarily left Dominion, the guild she leads, and let herself be recruited into Norcaine. It was then a matter of Kaerella (as Norcaine Guild Master) highlighting her on the list of members, using the "set" button to bring up a new little window, entering a name or title, and putting 99% in the two "contribution" boxes. Then Damor set to work in Egeha, gaining almost no experience for herself (apparently a 100% donation isn't possible at present) but earning masses of guild points for us. In all, in an hour or so, she racked up enough experience, fighting the Boucu Demons (yellow-named to her now that she's level 80) and other locals, to bring us what was listed as 13,497 guild points, but was probably more. To show his support, SirDarth went out to the Treants again, starting a little later - and scored 22! While Damor and Darth were getting almost no experience, they were getting the usual quantity of skill experience, which makes the 99% donation setting rather useful sometimes if people need skill points but don't want to level up and "leave behind" the particular monsters they were farming. Damor says some of her guild people stick at level 12 to fight the Sasquatches, though of course between level 10 and level 20 people tend to be on a ten-day timer to successfully finish their apprenticeship and get that very useful "event weapon". Level 26 to fight Treants would probably be another good point, or level 20 to fight Drakes...or level 6 is apparently sometimes used, for the Berserk Wolves.

So, Kae was able to spend another 1,000,000 gold, on top of yesterday's 2,000,000 (plus 500 skill points, to upgrade the guild to level six), and 6000 guild points, to earn the guild skill "Guild Notice" level zero, and then spend a further 200,000, and 2000 guild points, to learn "Expension of the guild member" (sic) level one, allowing Norcaine to have five more member slots beyond the five gained by the guild going up the one level. Thanks to Damor, Norcaine is thus in good shape, if we can only get some good active new members. A shame Damor had to leave, really, having a level 80 member did wonders for our average level. She was saying that there was a way to leave a guild without having to be guildless for a week, other than getting kicked out - but as it involved using the character "delete" button on the character choice screen, there might be some slight risk involved. Actually, deleting is a difficult thing to do, there is a 24 hour "cooling off period", to allow people to change their minds, or at least to remember to empty the character's inventory.

Talk of the forthcoming change to the game in which Evasion will be either scrapped entirely or very much toned down made me think of my expensive Pierce of Wind accessories, and how it looked as if my rogue would miss out on being able to use them properly - so I transferred them over from Kee, and Karella, recruited now into Norcaine since we have the room, teamed up with SirDarth for some Treant-fighting, after Kae had adjusted Darth's donation level down to 25%. But at level 23, even with the dexterity and evasion boost, Karella needed horse buffs and probably Divine Shield, and is really a bit underpowered as yet for Treants, so she ended up taking Enchantrella's usual non-combatant role for most of the time, letting Darth do the work. After a while she left, and Enchantrella took over, as she is more in need of the skill exp boost.

The evening's "Upgrade Love" event started at 8:00pm UK time, but the Cariae server was third on the list to be done, which left me wondering how late I'd have to stay online; the event was scheduled to end, after the fourth server group, at approaching 1:00am UK time. But things must have moved along rather swiftly, as it was only a few minutes after nine when I found myself up on the edge of the world - a very similar spot to where Leo goes to pet-train, though closer to Velpist Temple than the GHB lake. A GM was there, and this time I had the sense to immediately remove Darth's pet drake, to make trading Kee's next staff to him easy. The GM and the GS SouxieR didn't actually trade the improved +11 staff back, I just noticed it alongside me, and picked it up. And it was a very short downhill run back to where Darth had been fighting the Treants, along with Enchantrella again. By 9:45 the GMs had moved on to the final server group, Katar. I don't think the event was "fully subscribed", not a huge number of people enrolled for it. Psykore did the first part, the forum sign-up, but wasn't online this evening, so he is out of luck unless they do a "second sweep" through the servers for late arrivals.

So, that just left me to do a bit more Treant-fighting. Enchantrella now has 64 skill points towards the 153 needed for the second level of Expert Armoursmith, and is 32% of the way into level 24. Darth has just added 10% experience, but moved on to 106 skill points - maybe he should put them towards the 129 needed for the final level of Upgrade Mana (increases his total mana) or Divine Soul (increases magical defence by 10), or maybe he needs to start saving up for the level 32 skills...all in all, it is more skill points he needs, to make up for the 500 given away to the guild, if he is to be a "fully loaded" fighting knight one day.

Quiz Time - June 22nd

Enchantrella bravely went mining at lunch and teatime today - she lasted into the third mining period at lunch, and into the second at tea, before the inevitable crashes, so got a few stones for her trouble. Earlier, MistressDomino had been trying to sell a few items, despite a couple of disconnections. A few lucky scrolls and oddments did sell, but not a huge amount.

Once I actually started playing, Karella, my rogue, had half an hour at the Drakes, and then I gave Elva's account a little outing by taking Jacqueline down to the Bandits and Berserkers. She didn't stay there very long, but at least she got a Heaven Stone! Damor got in touch to say that she had managed to obtain the level 57 +11 mage staff from her friend for 40 million, rather than the initial asking price of 43 million, and Kee made a trip to Egeha on Cariae-5 to collect it from her, and pay the cash for it. As she was on the upstairs computer, she didn't stay there long, though made the mistake of mentioning to a knight what Damor's level was - apparently that's not a good idea on a PvP server, though, as Damor appears on the list of the top fifty Cariae mages, it's hardly a secret in her case. At that stage Damor hadn't got a third player to take the Escadalia role for a bit of power levelling, so it was soon time to sign off for food.

After my food break, I switched to SirDarth and Enchantrella, and headed out to the Treants; Sunday's teatime event had just begun, and, although there had, unusually, been no advance publicity on the Last Chaos website, it was double experience again. I had only just begun when Damor got in touch. She had still got our favourite Boucu Demon spot, and an Archer from her guild, Maddiz, was there - about ten levels ahead of me, and able to deal a lot of damage to the demons, as well as supply a little healing for us sometimes, while Itura as usual concentrated on Damor. So it was a matter of making a swift change to Kee, moving server to Cariae-5, registering, and taking Damor's recall to Egeha. To begin with, there was another Dominion high-level archer there, Chealsea, and I'm not sure what system was being used - Damor wasn't doing the last-minute mounted "return to village" thing, but Maddiz and I were getting a good amount of experience. But Chealsea soon had to leave, and we switched to the "return to village" method. Damor had asked me to bring 200 of the scrolls of memorizing with me, and I passed them over to her - and got an armour drop in return, probably worth more than the 200,000 gold I paid for the scrolls!

The session was a little under an hour, as Damor wanted to leave in good time for the weekly Quiz, so that she could get all four of her computers running, and four characters into the Cariae-4 quiz room; I wasn't sure why it had to be that particular non-PvP sub-server, it's not as if fights break out in there, but apparently Damor reckons that its quiz room tends to be less crowded than the others. Kee went along too, or course, and SirDarth was my second character in attendance; we both clicked on Damor, and settled back to watch the show, crossing my fingers that I wouldn't get a crash this week. Sadly, one of the trickier questions, concerning how much it costs to get a level 17 horse pet revived/unsealed, defeated the finest minds, and there was a sudden mass respawning in Randol marketplace. We had managed to get 12 questions right, thanks to Damor's knowledge of all the teleporters and their names, so didn't leave empty- handed - 10 tool aids each is always useful. It's a pity we didn't have any moonstones or heaven stones as booty as well, but you can't win them all.

Unfortunately, my connection decided that it had been playing ball too long, and started to play up - lucky I wasn't in Egeha, but of course during the quiz someone else had taken over our prime Boucu Demon spot. Darth and Enchantrella attempted to get out to the Treants, but managed to kill very few before a brace of disconnections. It was time to try restarting the modem, but as sometimes happens that "broke" the network abilities, so the upstairs computer, my gateway to the wide world of the internet, needed to have a System Restore. Still, as usual that got things back in working order, and Kee was able to go out to the Elite Goblins (and Rough Jaguars of Desert) for a little skill point farming. Well, given that my top speed with them is rather less than 10 points an hour, it's not very productive at the moment, by the end of horse buffs I'm down to a third health and about half mana, so I need time to recover before the next buff-time. Handy for drafting the blog, though! Things ought to be better when I reach level 49, however, my current +10 staff, the level 45 Mehtahtolon Staff, gives 178 + 140 attack, while my level 53 +11 Darkwhite Staff will give 234 + 258 attack, an improvement of 54.7% in my attack, by my calculations, though Damor reminds me that the actual weapon's attack figure is not the whole story, one's accessories, armour etc also make their contributions. I never did find a level 49 one, so will be skipping that staff entirely, hence the big jump.

Anyway, after a session there Kee had moved on by a further 2% experience, on top of the 71% from Damor's session in Egeha - and not only got back the 5 skill points lost on the previous Egeha outing (3 deaths), but got 2 all-new point too! You guessed it, my farming there is awfully slow... And just as I was ready to log out, Sammotina got in touch, using her other (Zedan) account, asking me to keep the Sammotina one active for her too. But when I logged in to that account, it was empty, no characters at all, so it looks as if she left it just too long between visits. I'm still going to keep the Zedan account active, anyway, and have promised to even try using its sorcerer, though that is a player type I know incredibly little about.

Slow Progress - June 23rd

I seem to start every posting with mentions of Darth and Enchantrella going mining until they crash, on average about 10 to 15 minutes in - so let's just take that bit as read, shall we? I also find I sometimes crash when logging in: User Name, Password, Enter, Send Error Report...?

I posted on the official Last Chaos forums yesterday about Norcaine's arrival at level six and places available for new members:

Norcaine Guild is Recruiting

Norcaine has just reached level six, so we have some new slots for friendly, active members. We are mainly to be found on c3 and c6 - some of our original members seem to have drifted away from LC, sadly, so we need new blood!

Generally we'll welcome players from level 25 upwards, though if you are starting a new character you intend to advance pretty quickly, we will gladly help you along - some people like to "freeze" their experience gain while they concentrate on getting lots of skill points from berserk wolves, sasquatches, drakes or treants, for example, and as a level six guild we can do that for you. We can also take on apprentices in the Guardian program, as long as you're able to get from level 10 to level 20 within the time allowed.

Our associated low-level guilds are Crafters of Iris, for crafter characters, and Discipline, for merchants, so if you have characters doing those sorts of things, we can tuck them in there, too.

Most of our people are on British or European timezones. If you want to join us, send me a message here!

...so far, we have had one response from a level 30 titan, Darkstorm44. Well it's a start...

Damor was in touch to make a few tiny corrections to yesterday's post, which has been suitably updated. I'd been looking at Zedan's sorcerer, and asked her why a couple of his bits of armour were marked in red as "sealed" - apparently with horse or dragon armour if you die with a red name that is what happens, and before the armour works properly again you have to pay the archbishop some money, rather like the way that the animal trainer can unseal a dead pet. If Zedan's account has been hacked, as he says, though, is it worth spending time and money on things, when the hacker could return? The sorcerer has about -88% experience, as he got killed

repeatedly, which isn't much good. But I guess it would be fun to play a grown-up specialist sorcerer, at least briefly, I must make sure to choose some not very challenging monsters for my first attempt. Berserk Wolves, for instance...

Well my playing time wasn't actually very long today, and started a bit later than would have been ideal as the connection was playing up, but when I got that settled, SirDarth and Enchantrella were able to go out to the Treants again. Enchantrella ended up 43% of the way into level 24, which isn't bad as all she has to do is stand about and wait for a pink candy to drop, with 92 skill points now towards the 153 she needs for level two of Expert Armoursmith - and Darth, despite cutting back his rate of experience gain (to that he gets more skill points per level), is now 50% of the way through level 30, with 134 unused skill points - 129 of which could be used to max out one of his passive skills, but maybe we should hold on to them for the Templar Knight skills that come available at level 32? One things for sure, after giving those 500 skill points away to the guild, he has some more skill point farming to do.

My New Staff - June 23rd

On the mining front, Enchantrella beat Darth easily today - he crashed almost at once, but she kept on going for the best part of an hour, so my "when LC crashes, I can..." computer plans seemed in jeopardy for a while!

I tried out the specialist Sorcerer, Zedan, though it looked as if his real owner had been playing him a bit since last night, suddenly he actually had some money, and was in a guild! I changed over the sealed armour for the previous bits that were in storage, which while a set or so low for him were a lot better than nothing, and went out to bash a few Berserkers. Turning into that red winged devil is rather cool, and that, along with a skill called Stone Skin and some sort of electic bolt, meant he didn't do badly, though I didn't stay awfully long - the best bit of loot was a large defence potion, though a little more cash got added, and I went to Dratan to get a level 1 pony to help pick up the drops.

A level 5 mage on my account, on the other hand, who I just need to get to level 10, fought some Berserk Wolves and got a heaven stone...it's all in the luck of the draw. She levelled up enough to get her hammer and knife, for mining and farming; I'm guessing that merchant Geres will soon have her collecting wolf fangs for his necklace business.

The main part of the afternoon was devoted to SirDarth and Enchantrella - as this is the last day of the blue and pink candy drops, it was their last chance to team up against the Treants, probably, though I must admit that a cut-back in the skill exp Darth gets, more than balanced by the "free" experience and skill exp for Enchantrella, means it is something that could still be useful to do. It was Enchantrella's turn to get to 50% of the way through her level, though she still needs some more skill points before she can improve her Expert Armoursmith credentials. Darth got a few skill points too, of course, and a few percentage points of experience.

While we were out there, the level 30 titan Darkstorm44 rode out to meet us - but for the second time, recently, the result wasn't a new Norcaine member yet - he needs to serve out his 7 days between guilds. You can't leave a guild and go straight into another one, is the general rule...I've added a second post to my forum thread to remind people (such as me) about that. ANyway, Darkstorm44 seemed a suitable prospect for Norcaine - he did mention the occasional bout of pk'ing, but apparently he has a sorcerer who does that sort of thing. Personally I'm not into pk'ing, I tend to be on non-PvP servers where, if a knight rushes up to you, it's probably to give you a Divine Shield buff, rather than attempt to lop your head off...

After a while Damor got in touch, and invited Keerella to join her in Egeha. The aim was to get Kee to level 49, which was only 19% away, before she logged out - and me too, both of us were planning an early night, LC-wise. To start with, I just ks'd Damor's kills, which is faster than fighting Elite Goblins. What we needed was another person, hopefully a few levels above me, to team with, so that as before Damor could do 90% of the work and then teleport back to town, and the pair of us, assisted by Itura, could do the actual killing and share all the experience. Escadalia wasn't available, she was in merchant mode - and Zeratus wasn't answering my calls either, at the start. Luckily after a while he got back to his keyboard, and agreed to come out to c5 Egeha and help us. As he does have an active Recall card, Damor didn't have to use scrolls of memorising to return after each village trip. Things weren't 100% smooth, Damor had had a long day and was getting tired, but nobody died, except Itura once, and after taking about 40 minutes to go up 3% by ks'ing, the remaining 16% went by considerably faster - so I'm now level 49, with my fine new Darkwhite Staff +10, thanks to Damor - and with that final-stage boost from Zeratus too. Hmm, should I try to get my staff up a further couple of levels, I wonder? I need to do some serious skill point farming now.

Giant Larvas - June 25th

My young mage, Memree, put on another level - somehow she has avoided being given a free Energy Collector, but she got the quest reward and the energy collection skill. There doesn't seem any reason to spend 1000 gold to buy her one, one doesn't often need the results of that particular farming method. Enchantrella didn't last long at her mining attempt today, though at least she managed to finish her old hammer, which was down to 35 Endurance, out of 7200. For no particular reason, I'm keeping Memree in her starting outfit, which I'm attempting to get up to +4, so any level 1 items I find on the ground are quickly scooped up and taken to be changed into smelting stones. I did reach the point of trying to go from +3 to +4 on her outfit today, but three out of six pieces got ruined. A level 4 mage that I've never done anything with has transferred her outfit across, and is in the process of being deleted, so Memree is still properly dressed. At least her wand upgraded properly, so has its glow now - and any other spare wands that I convert into smelting stones, well, at least I get two stones for my 25 gold!

Keerella decided to go out to Merac's Giant Larvas rather than to Dratan's Elite Goblins, and, after a brief ride along from the Gnoll Lancers to get the location on the scroll of memorizing, things moved along comparatively quickly. They are level 50, and, when I got into a solo party, yielded a healthy 20,000 experience and 1045 skill exp. I had added an Extreme Stone to my new Darkwhite Staff, so it is now +12, and thus my total magic attack rating moved up from my old staff's 625 to 829...or 60 more with the horse buffs applied. It looks as if I'm going to be beaming down to the Giant Larvas (or Larvae) for quite a while, first of all I need to get up to 194 skill points for the final level of Flame Field, and then there are two other skills I've qualified for now, Fear and Freeze Arrow, both of them looking rather useful - while at level 50 there's the passive skill Magic Rod, which will permanently increase my physical defence and attack speed. In all, it's a lot of skill points - I do have 238 skill points saved in Armoursmithing, but they wouldn't get me very far.

Kaerella was online for a little while, after Silmarian, the low-level US-based mage who'd replied to the recruitment posting in the LC forums, got in touch with Kee; Silmarian is level 8 now, and has duly been recruited into Norcaine. When she's level 12 she wants her experience gain to be "frozen", so that she can farm the Sasquatches for skill points, so that's what we'll do, if suitably reminded. And Norcaine will get the experience she donates, as guild points, not that there appears to be anything to use them for unless we go up another level. Hmmm, I wonder how SirDarth would feel about being frozen at Berserker level for a few weeks, to farm 550 skill points...?

Fastdaggergirl1 was in touch, asking after Elvastar - and I had to say it was a bit of a mystery, he'd been going into hospital some weeks ago for the kidney stone operation, and we'd heard nothing since. If I'd known at that point that she was only 10 I might have been a little more circumspect, but it is a pretty routine operation, so we can only hope that he will be returned to us. She said that it made her feel like crying, and I had to agree. Oh, and she was asking if anyone had come across a player called Ladyyunalesca (probably, like Fast, without the capital letter), as she was a bit of a long-lost friend of hers, and she wanted to get back in touch. Anyone with information, well we have the sign-in book here at www.Kaerella.com or you can email Kaerella at a domain called gmx.com...not that I recommend them if you're looking for an online mail provider, their interface is a bit slow and complex.

Enchantrella had a trip to the Boucu Demons in Egeha - Damor had filled her inventory, so in return for the gift of some accessories, Enchie took half a dozen demon drops to sell to Merchant Geres, who pays pretty well for such things. The total selling value of the six items came to 1,419,866 gold, which can't be bad, though actually I held on to the level 71 mage Darkpeal Pants +1, which are rather nice...MistressDomino may well soon be seen wearing those!

The pink and blue candy is still dropping, for a third week, so maybe Darth and Enchantra will go out to the Treants a time or two more - today though I had to leave the blue candy on the ground, as MistressDomino was busy back in Randol selling things, in her usual spot in Cariae-3 between Sophia and the Animal Trainer - and SirDarth would have had problems tagging along with Kee, those Giant Larvas attack anyone who comes near, including pets and non-combatants. I did have a couple of fairly lengthy sessions out there solo, which brought me 7% more experience, and 59 new skill points, which is pretty good, a lot better than the Elite Goblins. It's partly a matter of pace, somehow it's all a headlong rush there in Merac, moving and fighting and killing, being attacked and responding and moving on, watching for respawns, and so on. By my calculations getting to the next level, 50, there should bring in around 776 more skill points, over the next couple of weeks probably (it would be just a bit too boring to spend all my time there, so other characters will be played too) - and that would be enough to finish Flame Field and get all levels of Fear and Freeze Arrow, and have enough points to get the first three levels of the level 50 passive skill Magic Rod. The fourth and fifth levels of that will need another 470 points, which will take us a fair way through level 50 to get...if Kee keeps farming until the end of that level, and July, she'll be able to "bank" some points in two levels of Armoursmithing too.

The special Item Mall offers this week seem to have an upgrading theme, with sale price Lucky Smelting Stones (as usual, the really cheap ones were all snapped up by the Americans before those of us on this side of the Atlantic woke up), "twofers" on Runes of Protection, and a package with an Extreme Stone and two Heaven Stones - Damor's theory is that this means there should be an "upgrade event" this coming weekend, where for an announced time using Heaven Stones to upgrade an item has an extra percentage chance to work. I hope I'll be able to be online then, my time over the next few days will be a bit limited - Kae has a staff (for future use) that needs work done on it, and Kee's next one could really do with a boost. It would be useful if Darth got the next sword up ready, too.

More Giant Larvas - June 26th

My rogue, Karella, is a pretty good herb harvester, so while I was busy all day she spent a fair bit of time out with her knife, gathering the herb leaves and herb trunks - very useful at the moment, as Kee's poor drake takes a lot of damage from the Giant Larvas. There were three or four crashes, but a lot of harvesting was achieved.

By the way, there are a few new screenshots recently added to the gallery's latest page here at www.kaerella.com, so do check them out, won't you?

So, only an evening session today, and that was spent out south of Merac's castle, battling the Giant Larvas. The place was actually quite busy, there was a Dutch team there as well and a couple of other solo fighters. I seemed to get quite a few blue candy drops which i couldn't pick up..annoying, particularly if no male characters are around to pick them up, the candy just lies there and one's silly drake keeps heading for it whenever you want him to pick up the latest gold drop.

Silmarian was in touch to ask for her "experience freeze" to begin, as she has now reached level 12, so after a few more minutes I switched to Kae and set her up with 100% experience donation. Escadalia contacted me too, with an invitation to somewhere exotic, the pyramid I think, but I had to say sorry, I'm skill point farming for the next two levels...

Well, I went up 12.5%, fighting flat out and using quite a few health pots and mana pots, as well as a candy cane or two left over from Christmas. 1490 pet points shows how busy I was - and 55 skill points, which meant that I could spend 194 sp on the fifth and final level of Flame Field, so that's one more skill sorted. I don't think I've ever tried to use that one, but I'm sure there are circumstances when it would be very useful. I hope.

I'll be able to start learning a new skill tomorrow, luckily lower levels don't cost as many skill points - it's usually only the fifth level that costs a lot. And the higher the level at which the skill becomes available, the more skill points it is liable to cost. Perhaps Fear ought to be next, it would be handy to be able to scare away a Giant Larva for a few seconds if it was trying to eat my poor drake...

Giant-Size Larva Team-Up - June 27th

Karella managed to get through another knife while harvesting herbs, despite a disconnection and a crash or three. The main reason that she gets to do some resource gathering is that people seem more likely to drop rogue knives and hammers, after discovering that they bought the wrong one for their character, than other kinds. One doesn't want to waste such things, right?

There was a "midnight raffle" last night, or an "8:00am raffle" as we'd call it in Britain, and it managed to reach a tier at which an hour or so's double experience was awarded, starting at 10:00am or soon after. According to Damor, it was still going on some hours later, my theory is that the GMs all went off to bed, and nobody was left to switch it off again.

Itura, Damor's level 49 cleric alter ego, got in touch with Karella to suggest that, if I lent her Kae's armour, as she doesn't have a very high-level set herself, a joint party to the Giant Larvas for Itura and Kee would be something we could do - so I switched to Kae, took the Recall to the normal Boucu Demon spot, and traded across, on loan, Kae's level 5/52 armour set (all +6 except one +10 item) and level 53 wand (also +6) - which Kae won't be able to use for a while as she's only level 42 at the moment. Itu kindly gave me some tool aids she'd got, which is handy as MistressDomino had just about run out of things to sell, after a very successful Wednesday night which left her with only a few Lucky Scrolls.

A little later Damor reported that she had been given a Chain of Tiger and a Pierce of Wind by that generous philanthropist, the Great Gold Dragon, and I took the opportunity to ask if she still had the Origin of Land she had offered Zeratus a day or two back for 6 million - and would it be a suitable accessory for SirDarth to use? She told me that she did still have it, and when I asked about the Chain of Tiger confirmed that it too was a useful thing for a knight to have - and I could buy the pair for 20 million. She also had got in her inventory two more items of the level 70/72 mage armour set that MistressDomino covets, and included them in the deal, so now Mistress D only needs the shirt part of the set, and does look rather smart. As she is only level 10 there would be a bit of an armour penalty if she wore that set outside town, but she does have a regular armour set too. I asked if Damor needed anything from the Item Mall, so we have arranged that I should repay her for the stuff by spending aeria points there for her as and when needed.

The teatime event started at five - very possibly it was still the raffle's bonus continuing! I decided that Kaerella was the one who could really benefit from double experience, and headed for Merac Jail. I teamed initially with KINGMEN, a rogue who at level 29 was rather pushing things by being there, particularly going to the far end of the first room and taking on two or three dire canine types at a time, but Greater Heal did its job and she did stay alive. A level 39 sorcerer called ArabianPrince joined, and after the rogue left suggested a trip to the Giant Larvas - which started well, but when Kae got caught between buffs by about three of them, she did unfortunately die. Still, 4% experience got added, and 8 more skill points... but it was awfully strange to have Kae teamed up with a sorcerer like Elva again...like Elva, but not Elva...

I changed to Keerella to go back there - the party still existed, as Mistress D had been in it from the start to ensure I got the "solo party" bonus, but ArabianPrince had left the area, pretty wisely as at his level you do need a healer there, and left the party too after a while. I took my revenge on the Giant Larvas, and before too long Itura got in touch, and came down to join me, which speeded things up a lot, and it was nice not to have to watch my health. It was fun to team with her, she was in a chatty mood and, well, the renewal of the horse buffs seemed to come round very quickly. She mentioned a small mistake on the 24th June entry I must put right, too, while mentioning how much she liked the blog, and that it was just as well there wasn't a "comment" function or she'd be contributing as much as I do. Damor rode down to join us - I wondered what that was about, but it was to transfer her top-class accessories across.

Kee went up about 11%, with the double experience, and gained 41 skill points, 23 of which have been used to get the first two levels of Fear, so that's a good start on that skill. Level three needs a few more points, but ought to be added tomorrow.

In fact, this blog entry is not quite being done at the end of my Last Chaos day, as I've promised to go back in for a spawning of gold-bearing kung-fu pandas, er, pandora's beasts, to team up again with Itura, who knows how such events work. More on that next time!

And a Guest Report from Damor! - June 27th

After my breath had calmed down and my sweat stopped dropping from my head to the floor, I was able to start my PC to get my usual Friday after-college routine going (yes 12km at more than 20km/h under 30 degrees causes these things even though I am in good condition). This routine consists of checking mail, reading news and blogs, checking some browser games, and finally start LC. After the usual entering of my password and user name I popped up on C1, waiting for the rendering of the surroundings to finish, I remembered I had missed bringing a book back yesterday, so my extra time means an extra cost will have to be paid, sigh. The browsing through shops was very brief this time, as not many had set up a shop close to the fountain, known as the location for lvl 70+ stuff. As usual, no mage blue stuff set to give you the best evasion (there's other blue stuff, like additional defence, on the armor pieces, but that's not considered as useful as evasion).

So, there was nothing to delay an attempt to get a lift to Egeha - however I didn`t started the usual way, asking all the online people on my friends list, but logged on to every server, joining all solo parties there and hoping someone high level in the party was in Egeha. At the second server I tried (c3), I had success. The drawback was that I found my favourite spot (known as "main") taken, so I asked if the people partying there could kindly whisper me once they left. And about 30 mins later this was the the case, as the GGD had shown up. That also pulled my intention back from Boucu Demons and I started to attack the GGD, though without using skills as I didn't want my mana to go down uselessly, but just to make the GGD feel busy so that he wouldn't fly away. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find someone in my friends list in the mood to help me kill him, so I had no option other than taking a mana stealer and starting firing all I have (Freeze Arrow, Terra Spear, Chaos Nova). I slogged away about 20% of its hp in one buff time.

While the fourth buff time was running, the usual group of weavers spawned, so I pulled out my horse and went to town, in order to use a memorizing scroll and pop up close to him, but not in the range where the weavers would start to attack me. Carefully I went close to him, and cast my Sloth on the GGD - then he attacked me, the weavers still standing around, waiting on the first kill, spawning to check the spot. The rest of the Great Gold Dragon`s hp went down without any problems, as my (rather bad) evasion armor and my three Stones of Shadow were able to make the GGD always miss me. Shortly before he died I took an item drop booster and a lucky scroll to maximize my chances of a rare drop, and indeed the "chicken" left a Pierce of Wind under its dead body, quickly picked up by me. After that I got Itura, my cleric, to come to the spot, buffed myself again and started killing demons with their usually 880 skill exp and 1,595,214 experience.

After about an hour, Davest8ion asked me whether I wanted to kill the GGD on another server. So I replied yes, logged out, and found myself recalled, after logging in, in an area with Little Scorpionmantis monsters, with the GGD in sight, I instantly ran to him and start attacking him, quickly checked my friends list (no high level people on), took another mana stealer and again brought him down, and this time he dropped me a Chain of Tiger, not worth as much as a Pierce of Wind, but two good drops from two GGDs, very nice. Right after killing him I went back to c3, got recalled by a friend I'd brought there earlier, and continued with demons - and after a short time a third GGD spawned above me. As my mana stealer hadn't finished I started attacking him too, and got him to 30% of his hp before my stealer finished. I did the rest without taking a new one as they cost me 1.5 million gold each, rather more slowly and with attack minerals without "cheating". This time he didn't drop me anything; a possible reason is that a knight passed by and conc'd me; I didn't use an item drop booster as its part of the game code that the player who buffed me would get the killing blow. I continued for a few more hours demon fighting, including a short visit from one of Kee`s characters; she got my Chain of Tiger and (from a day or two ago) my Origin of Land, in return to promising to sell me some Item Mall things when I need them. She got a pretty good bargain - well, protect your ap seller as well as you can, a good ap provider is as rare as the GGD!

After perhaps five hours of slogging demons I got too bored to continue, though I added 25 skill points and 20% of the experience needed to level. There was an double experience event going, but I don't really care as I don't want to level at the moment, I want to see the new skills first and decide if its worth getting them, as I farm better at level 80 than I would at level 90. So I took a break, and went to watch TV and eat a bit. At about 8pm CESST I logged on in LC again in order to team up with Keerella as we had discussed before,but this time not with my main character Damor, but with Itura my level 49 cleric who needs more sp very much. After figuring out where she was with the help of the Norcaine guild channel I had to walk all over Merac as I had not done for about three months, as Itura doesn't have her own mount. Shortly before arriving at the Giant Larvae I reminded Keerella to register for a party to make it easier to find her. Once I managed that, we started to slog away, it felt very slow as I killed them slower than demons, but fortunately Kee crushed them more quickly so I could use some of her gained skill exp too. In exchange she got the cleric skill Charm, which adds 50 more to her magical attack, and a healing every now and then, though she didn't need it as much as Damor did at that level, I think because of the 3 Pierce of Winds she is wearing and her better armor, I think at her level Damor still had a 45/47+4 set. Thinking of Kee`s rares I got the idea to temporarily transfer my SoS from Damor to Itura as she needs them more at the moment. Seconds after I finished with that, the Larvae damage went down by an incredible amount, I could kill for two full buff times without any healing needed. The skill points itself went up more quickly than they had for a long time too, I made 21 skill points in a very short time, more than I expected. We decided to take a break, and team up later when a pandora event was due to start. After I logged back in for that event, we had a couple of misunderstandings about the time and places of the pandas, but finally we managed to kill a whole group of them, adding 500k to each of our inventories.

and back to me - drafted before I read Damor's entry...

The Pandora spawn last night was a little late, which was just as well as I had a little trouble getting back in to Last Chaos, but Itura and I placed ourselves where, she thought, it was a good bet that a mob of assorted Pandora Beasts would be spawned. To pass the time I started killing the local Butchers - it was strange, while they tended to give me about 400/500 experience and 1 skill exp, Itura, exactly the same level as me, was only getting 4/6 experience from them. Unfortunately, when the announcement finally came, there were none to be seen there, and it was a matter of riding round Merac looking for the glowing, ghostly beasts - I had the advantage after we split up, having a horse, and covered a fair amount of ground, before finally being able to type in "here"!

Unfortunately Itura didn't read that, she was busy typing in "pff, none here" and "I'll try c2", sigh...with relogging, it took a while before she got my messages, but eventually she came running back. It was a big group of the beasts, with level 20, 30, 40, and 50 ones, glowing werewolves, spiders, and other shapes, some giving extra experience, some extra skill exp even, and quite a number giving good gold drops. I only went up 0.71% in experience, and gained 2 skill points (plus 37 pet points) - but on the gold front I went up about 800,000, which is always useful. I think Itura mentioned getting about 500,000, but then, she did arrive late. We looked round a bit more, in case there were any other undiscovered groups, but we didn't find any more. As it was getting rather late, we both logged out.

Another Short Day - With Pandas - June 28th

Karella managed about an hour of herb harvesting before crashing, and I think SirDarth later on lasted even longer at the mines - unlike Sheele, who vanished pretty quickly, though hurried back.

For someone who wouldn't be able to actually play until the evening, I seemed to keep fairly busy. Enchantrella used her weapon-making skills to create a level 57 Puplern Crossbow for Sheele, and a level 53 Peaceglory Wand for Itura - there is supposed to be around a 25% chance of failure, where the manual remains but all the materials vanish, but we were lucky. Unfortunately Itura needed the 40 ToolAids back that she'd recently given me, so that she could get the raw materials needed, but she did return the last remaining one later. I suspected that they both had their sights on upgrading these items when the special extra-chance-of-success "upgrade probability event" started. Someone in town heard Enchantrella mentioning the Peaceglory Wand, as she confirmed that that was the item she should make - Damor discovered that he actually had a +12 one for sale, and urged me to buy it for Kae at 30 million, saying that was a good price. I bought it, and I've lent it to Itura - I've sold them the +6 one Itura had been using, Damor paid a generous 8 million for it, another candidate for upgrading I'm sure. Damor was surprised to find another unidentified Origin of Land in her inventory, and passed that over temporarily, with the hope that that would make another one magically appear tomorrow...I decided to buy it also, so Darth now has three top-classs accessories to make his grind easier.

Darkstorm44 had finished his "between guild" seven days, and came out to Darth at the mine to join Norcaine - so that gives us another Highlander type titan, it's good to get some new blood into the guild - it was also good to see Sheele about.

When I was finally able to actually play, I checked the website, only to see that I'd missed another Pandora's Beasts spawning by about an hour - a bit soon after last night's excitements. So I teamed with Itura again down down at the Giant Larvas, or Giant Larvae if you have a classical eductation and go for Latin plurals - and after a little while Sheele joined us, though she did get a few disconnections. It didn't take her long to ride back, though. On one of her rides, she spotted a newly-spawned group of Pandora's Beasts, and used Recall to take us over to her. We despatched them, and riding around found a couple more groups, though we did have to share them with other people. Some of the Pandas are as bad at pet-eating as the larvae, and Sheele's drake did get killed - mine got pretty low, I completely ran out of herbs again. The idea would be for us only to kill the level 50 Pandas, and leave the 40, 30 and 20 ones for lower-level characters, but sometimes they attacked together...in the end Sheele was using Recall to remove us from their aggro range.

The Pandas meant that Kee added about 1.8 million to her bank account, which was useful. All told, Kee went up 7% in experience, and added 26 skill points - 22 of which went on getting level three of the skill Fear. Oh, and 721 pet points got added, with Greedo bravely trying to pick up all the cash.

The Upgrade Probability Event was due to start at 10:00pm uk time, and Damor had big plans, hoping to make another +15 weapon or two to finance her next few levels - Sheele was hoping to do some upgrading also, and, as long as my Runes of Protection held out, I was planning to do some self-improvement as well. For Kee, that meant trying to improve an upcoming level 57 Blood Shadow Staff, without any joy at all - six heaven stones and six runes of protection II used, but it ended at only +10 - but at least Kae got her current level 45 Storm's Eye to +10, and the level 49 Sainningpollars Wand to +10 as well, after much use of heaven stones and runes of protection I. If that's what happens when the chance of success is double, remind me never to try such things at the normal odds! Things aren't too bad up to +10, it's trying to go further, with the chance of an item being knocked back to +10 again, that is the problem.

A Late Start - June 29th

After being out all day, it was a relief to start up the computers, and log in to Last Chaos in good time for the Sunday evening Quiz at seven, UK time... but as the crowds grew around the domain merchant, it became apparent that something was wrong - and finally an announcement confirmed that the quiz was going to have to be later. Possibly two or three hours later, though the time on the website translated as 9:30 UK time. It would make sense to have the Quiz then, rather than while the usual tea-time bonus event was running, but a lot of people who usually go to the Quiz weren't too happy as they couldn't be on that much later...

Itura and Damor seem to have had mixed fortunes in last night's upgrade possibility event - Damor got all her mage armour up to +10 (after leading us on to spend so many aeria points on runes of protection, right at the very end of the event, after I was offline, the finks increased the success probability further, to, as far as I can gather, what we'd been told earlier that it already was), but Itura broke her supply of mage wands, hopefully not including the one I lent her. After my busy day I was a bit tired, and while I gladly accepted some freebie old healer armour items, to transfer to a storage character at some point, stuff started to get complicated - once I'd worked out what Itura was asking, I had to change to Enchantrella to tell her the ingredients needed to make more wands... Enchantrella has two of the necessary manuals, one of which may be actually mine, and one of which may actually be Itura's, and I have no idea what I ought to charge for the one that is mine...

We had yesterday discovered why Itura had been getting so little experience from the Butchers, while we waited for the panda spawn - she was set to donate 99% of her experience gain to the guild. As she does actually want to level up, as she gets a new skill at level 50, that needed changing, and duly was changed to zero.

Itura had been talking about teaming with Kee against the Giant Larvae again, but had apparently already spent about five hours down there today, so was tired of them, sigh. So she'll level up and stop going there well before I get anywhere...which is a pity, as it is a great help to have a healer with one when fighting those ugly great things, and of course Itu is good company. I think there was some sort of football game on the television.

The Quiz, when it came, was a bit of a mess - there was almost no countdown for the first question, so that before people could choose the X or O side, they were booted out into Randol. Most of us dashed back in, and got a few questions right - including which game appeared first, Ultima Online or Meridian (?), which foxed a few people. Like a lot of players, I kept on dashing back in, reloading the area and running through hoping that the quiz wouldn't choose that moment to boot out everyone who wasn't on the correct half of the floor. I answered a few questions correctly - and that included the one that gave out the 5 Heaven Stones! Damor got the 10 Tool Aids question right too, she was sprinting around her room getting all three of her characters back in, and they all got 5 Heaven Stones each, which shows great coordination, and luck. All in all, a chaotic few minutes! I didn't realise that if you got the appropriate question right, you got the same reward as people who'd been in there getting questions right the whole time.

Well, after that Damor and Itura went off to use their newly-acquired ToolAids to get the materials to make one level 53 Peaceglory Wand - and I changed to Enchantrella, got the ingredients from Itura, used the manual, and had another successful weapon creation - I handed it over to Itura, wished her good luck with her upgrading, and logged out. Another "upgrade event" would keep me up too late, and be too expensive in runes of protection, I just hope Kee's future staff, downgraded repeatedly during yesterday's attempts, gets another "upgrade love" event coming along for it.

Reading her "guest blog", it's no wonder Damor is so successful - she works at it, she concentrates, she puts in the hours. I only managed about an hour with the Giant Larvae before the quiz - despite the double experience I just went up 5.5%, and only added 23 skill points, so not enough for the next level of Fear yet. 680 pet points, and still a long way to go for Greedo's next level - he continues to get attacked by the larvae just as much as I do, a pity he can't use the Pierce of Wind accessories.

Back to Normal - June 30th

Karella has been busy farming herbs to keep Greedo's health bar up - "Greedo" being the unofficial name for Keerella's drake. It was nice to have a proper amount of time to play and generally mess about today, after the short hours of recent days - Memree, my level 9 mage, now has a full +4 "fairy set" of the starting mage armour set, with the circlet and wand also similarly plussed. I did make an attempt to get the wand up to +5, but it was "ruined", lucky I'd already made a +4 replacement for it.

After various short adventures and general trading of items between characters, it was about a quarter past three UK time. Itura logged on just as Kee was heading across Randol to get to the teleporter for Merac, to say that she needed to do an hour's homework, and then would be available for a team-up fighting the Giant Larvae - to which I replied that I was going to head for them and fight for about an hour before I vanished for food! I rejected the suggestion that I should eat an hour early, as that would have made a ludicrously long evening, and Itu decided to pospone her academic essay-writing, so we could both fight them together.

So that's what we did - Itura used a couple of Blood Frenzy scrolls, it looked to me as if by hitting her in that form the larvae were causing themselves damage, which would be rather clever. Later she went afk for a while, standing just by a tree close to one wall; it must be a safe spot I suppose, as no nearby larvae attacked her.

As part of the 1000 aeria points I owe her, Itura asked for a Bonus Book of Melding, and a cover for her wand - so I spent 224 aeria points on those, and transferred them over, though not until I was safely back in Merac. And Itu very kindly passed over a spare cover for a mage staff she had; apparently they can't be used on high-level weapons like the one Damor is now using. My main account is actually rather short on aeria points at the moment, partly because of buying all those Runes of Protection II for that evil "upgrade probability event", and partly because the last lot I bought never turned up in my in-game Mall inventory. So, after allowing the Aeria Games people a few days to get things sorted out, I've finally sent them a complaint.

Kee got enough skill points before tea for me to be able to get level 4 of Fear, for 54 points - level 5 needs another 194, though. I bought the required Bonus Book of Melding for myself, and, following Itu's instructions, carefully added the strange cover to my mage staff. The possible bonus was from +1 to +3, and, wouldn't you know it, I got the +1 - it all helps, but boy is the thing ugly! I think in town I'll put it away, though that means I'll have to remember to equip it before teleporting larvae-wards.

Darkstorm 44 was able to get his friend Galadorius to meet Kaerella in Randol, so we were able to enroll him in the guild - after only playing for a week he's already level 28, so he's working well...and he manages to fit in the occasional hour of Call of Duty too! Zeratus also took the opportunity to have his level 21 rogue recruited.

Anyway, I went back to the Giant Larvae after that, and arrived there at almost the same time as Itura, and a lengthy and productive session ensued. At one point, when I went far enough round the far corner of the Giant Larvae area to see a Cerebril, and mentioned the Salamander Ruins, Itu decided to run off to the main "Sally Ruin" point, to check out how they compared with our regular foes. It's just as well I have a horse, as it was difficult to keep up with her! We fought some, and the Cerebril that they pal up with, but while they have the advantage of not being pet-eaters, Itura decided that there really weren't enough of them to sustain a full-scale assault, we'd be running from one end to the other in search of targets, and thus would be farming rather more slowly. The supply of Giant Larvae is just about endless! So back we went, to the usual warm welcome.

Kee made 53 skill points today, and went up by 11% on the experience side, which took me to halfway through level 49.. Just over 2000 pet points too, but it will still be a while before Greedo levels up. There was a special "unlimited rebate" offer on resurrection scrolls, and their close relations that restore either the experience or skill points lost when one is killed - that is a preparation for the new patch, only a day away now, so it looks as if the GMs think we are going to die a lot when Evasion is reduced in usefulness, and monster skills get tweaked. I bought a few; Itura was saying that it is possible to trade them in merchant mode now, or transfer them, but it may not be after the patch. Times are about to get interesting! I just hope my Pierce of Wind accessories don't lose too much of their value and usefulness.

Unbloggishly, here we read from the top down - so the month continues here from the top!